The Massholes Have Landed

LL and I are in Pennsylvania and happy to be out of the car. Very, very happy. We didn't hit any traffic and actually made very good time, but it's still a long drive. Our GPS unit, AKA the Lady in the Box, decided to throw a tantrum a few miles outside of Scranton but hey, who hasn't thrown a tantrum or two around there?

Our rental car for the trip is a 2009 Chrysler Sebring. It would make an excellent golf cart. Still, it got good mileage and we've arrived in one piece. That's all that matters.

Our hotel room is quite adequate for our purposes for the evening... sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a tremendously fun day.

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A Few Irreligious Thoughts to Ponder

You've probably heard by now about a certain presumptuous jackass of a columnist named Jim Griffith who writes for the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald. Griffith has achieved 15 minutes of Internet infamy by penning a column entitled "A few religious thoughts to ponder." In it, he explains how terrible Thanksgiving is for atheists:

Thanksgiving must be a terrible time for atheists. They have no God to thank.

They do not have the privilege of gathering with family and friends to express gratitude by saying: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." An atheist on his deathbed faces serious uncertainties. Gazing upward, he pleads: "Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul -- if I have one."

The column was found out and replied to by a series of atheists objecting to such nonsense and, after less than two days, the newspaper saw fit to close the comments so that no more respondents could rake Griffith over the coals for being, as I said, a presumptuous jackass. I've checked other items in the newspaper, including other columns by Griffith, and none of them have had their comments closed after many days or weeks. Just this one. Apparently, the Newnan Times-Herald didn't want too many atheists to have the chance to debunk Griffith's garbage by mentioning how they celebrate Thanksgiving — at least not in a forum that locals were likely to see. It just won't do for a newspaper to report inadvertently that atheists celebrate the holiday in much the same way that non-atheists do and that the atheists are, after all, human beings with families, affections and gratitude. At least, it won't do for the small-time newspaper to reveal these truths to the residents of Newnan, GA.

As a result, those of us who didn't have the chance to respond to Jim Griffith's "few thoughts," which I suspect are a very few, at the paper's website during the 36 hours in which the opportunity to do so was available will have to do it elsewhere. I'll do it here.

I have a lot of things for which to be thankful this year, and not a single iota of it requires or has anything to do with any deities whatsoever.

Like many people across America, regardless of their beliefs, I will be joining my family to celebrate the holiday. LL and I will be leaving within the next couple of hours to head to north central Pennsylvania, just as we did last year. You may not see it readily, but there's a lot of gratitude embodied in that last sentence.

First off, I'm thankful for having gotten through another year during which a blindly religious president mismanaged the country in which I live into numerous hardships. I survived that year despite the existence of religious radicals in other countries who would like to see people like me dead... and when I say "people like me," I mean Americans. They want to inflict pain upon us because their religious fundamentalism calls for violence against people with whom they disagree. I'm thankful that this faith-stuffed anti-intellectual will soon be a former president and that his replacement might actually turn out to be a person of intelligence and ability who could wind up improving things, even if only a little. 2008 hasn't been a very good year for my country and I'm glad it's almost over. I'm thankful to the 7,000,000 people, too, who may well have changed the course of history during the last election. We shall see what really happens in the months and years ahead, but I'm thankful for at least having the hope that it won't be the same as what's gone before.

I'm thankful that I'm getting to spend another Thanksgiving with my sister, niece and brother-in-law. My sister and I had no contact at all for more than a decade, and this was in no small part due to religious belief. My parents found much to hate about the world and about differences of opinion and about people who are different from them thanks to their faith, you see, and they disowned first me in part because of that faith. They told my sister that I was a drug addict, that I was in jail and probably dead, to make as sure as they could that she wouldn't try to find me. When I finally tracked her down, I learned that she had been similarly disowned for the grievous sin of falling in love with someone of a different faith than that of our parents — even though neither my sister nor he practiced any religion at all. When they got married, nobody from my family came to the wedding other than myself. I gave the bride away. Tomorrow, we'll celebrate Thanksgiving together, along with my rather precocious niece and the rest of our non-traditional clan, none of whom are particularly religious and several of whom are outright non-believers. How could I not be grateful for this? The only involvement of a deity here, at least the imagining of one, was to drive people apart.

LL is coming with me, of course. This year, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary together. LL comes from a country in which religious differences led to a generation-long civil war in which members of her family and friends of her family died in terrible and inhumane ways. Her cousin, for example, was detained by a Syrian-backed militia, hauled away to Syria, and tortured for years. She spent long stretches of time huddled with her family in an underground parking garage hoping to avoid being shot or blown up by Syrians and Israelis and their proxies — all on the basis of ancient religious divisions. Survive it she did, though, and this year she became a US citizen and voted in an election for the first time in her entire life. I am thankful that LL is here with me, relatively safe and about to enjoy the holiday. I'm thankful that she survived a long and terrible war, that she made it to the US, and that she's stuck by me all these years, through the best of times and the not-so-good.

I'm thankful to the university I attend and to the people there who give of their time and knowledge as I grind away at earning a graduate degree. There was a time in my life, not so long ago, during which I never thought that I could get this far. I worked hard and here I am, but the opportunity had to be offered by others, too. I have that opportunity and am grateful for it.

I'm thankful that Tycho, a lizard who has practically been family, has survived another year, despite last year's unwarranted death sentence. He's sitting near my shoulder as I write this, probably wondering when breakfast is coming. Alas, the weather is too cold for Tycho to make the trip to Pennsylvania with us this year. He's going to be rather bored with no humans to entertain him for the four days we'll be gone. Tycho has worked out a lot of things in his long lizard lifetime, but how to work the TV remote isn't one of them. I expect that he'll spend much of his time asleep. In any case, he's exceeded the average lifetime of a member of his species in captivity by nearly a third now and is still in good health. Thank you, Tycho, for sticking around for so long. There will be lobster roaches and macaroni and cheese when we return. I suppose someone could argue that some deity is allowing Tycho to go on living. You know, Lizard-Jesus or HerpAllah or something. That would be a very childish person, but I'm sure someone who will read this will have the thought cross their mind.

Which brings me to another bunch for which I'm thankful, and that is the many people who have fought and are still fighting to reverse the ever-threatening flood of irrationality that might otherwise engulf us all and snuff out the light of the Enlightenment. They keep us progressing, sometimes at great cost. They're the ones who hope to remove the motivations for these religious wars and faith-based familial decay, who object to and dissect and defeat all the magical thinking that is only a hair's breadth away from complete ascendancy at times. I'm grateful to the teachers, the scientists, the historians, the living human memory-banks who remember the past and dedicate themselves to our not repeating it.

There is more — much more — but I have to get ready now to hit the road. It's a long drive from here to there. All things considered, I'm thankful to be making that six hour schlep today.

And you know what, Jim Griffith of the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald? I'm even grateful to you today. You've given me one more reminder of how low we humans can sink if we decide to measure the worth of others with yardsticks designed and built of our own narrow views. You're a good cautionary example of just how wrong we can be, and thus how wrong whole societies can go, when our eyes get so full of our own self-esteem that we place ourselves in judgment of the rest of the world based on nothing but the desire to be thankful to anything other than that little fraction of humanity it is our privilege, and sometimes our burden, to actually know.

Like the majority of Americans, I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with a ridiculously large meal on Thursday evening. Like those millions of other Americans, there's something else I'll be doing early on Friday morning. It's then that I will be thinking most of Mr. Griffith.

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After the Election: Symptoms of an American Pathology

With all of the joyful noise following the last Presidential election,it's sad to have to be reminded that there's still an old sickness in our cultural body that is yet to be cured. Still, it doesn't come as a surprise. Months before the election, the purveyors of hatred were already making their voices heard. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the threats have kept on coming and have gone beyond words to action in some cases. Now that America will have its first president whose skin isn't pinky-beige, whose hair looks a bit different than the Caucasian type, whose father was an African, the venom is ratcheting up.

There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

Some of the incidents tracked include:

• ...Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door...
  
• Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: "Let's shoot that nigger in the head..."
  
• At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins."
  
• Racist graffiti was found in places including New York's Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted
  
• Kilgore, Texas, where the local high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.
  
• Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.
  
• University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur...
  
• Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported...
  
• Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.
  
• A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted 'Obama.'
  
• In Forest Hills, PA, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying "now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house."

— Source

From sea to shining sea, indeed.

It would be naive to even ask why this is happening. We all know why. The pathology has been around long enough. One might as well ask what causes the common cold or why the sky is blue. There are people in this country who, having accomplished nothing with their own lives, identify their own value — and by extension the value of other human beings — by some easily distinguishable physical trait, some bit of superficial biological coincidence. It's all they've got, and they'll cling to it for all they're worth because it is all they're worth. Call that bit of inconsequential physicality into question and you call their value as a human being into question. You make an enemy who may well take it upon himself to extract vengeance.

That someone who looks different, who doesn't share some valued hue of the flesh with such people, has achieved the nation's highest political office drives such people into a rage. Some meaningful privilege that they'd hoped and believed was connected with their appearance has turned out not to be so connected. It is for this reason that I expect at least one assassination attempt to be made upon Obama. It's a pathetic expectation, I know, but it would be just as naive not to think such an event will come as it is to question the motivation for it in the first place.

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A Last Excellent Day at MSA

Today was my last day at the MSA conference. There's still one more day left, but for a variety of reasons I have to get up early tomorrow and make the long drive back to Worcester. Not the least of these is the fact that a petty, bureaucratic,politically-motivated dean at Florida State University has taken it upon himself to put up a massive and ridiculous roadblock in the way of LL's quest for a PhD. I won't get into the details; she'll write about it when and if she's ready. All I'll say is that I've never heard of such a moronic, pig-headed thing being done to someone who has been one of the few bright lights for a department that is now being dissolved largely because of the incompetence of another pig-headed bureaucrat in academic clothing. With people like these deans at the helm, I would have to advise anyone considering a PhD program at Florida State to put it as low on their list of possibilities as they can possibly can. If it were a boat, it would have the word "Titanic" painted at the prow.

Other than learning of LL being screwed over yet again, though, today was the kind of day that makes me regret having to leave a day early. Two lablings gave excellent presentations on their research as did my advisor. I take a good deal of pride in being part of this group even if I haven't begun contributing as much as I hope to... soon.

I had lunch today with Joey Spatafora and my advisor and so had the chance to listen in and/or talk about everything from plans for AFTOL2 to Wall-E and The Fantastic Planet. I learned that Joey reads this blog when he recognized me upon our introduction as Mike O'Risal. So did one of the postdocs from his lab. In fact, no fewer than four people I met today already knew me by my nom d'blog. I had best be careful not to mention my rampant crack addiction and penchant for devouring live kittens here. Someone might be looking.

Today was also the day of the Karling Lecture, delivered by Nick Talbot of the University of Exeter. The topic was "Investigating the biology of plant infection by the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe grisea using functional genomics." The rice blast fungus is a problem right up there with the potential of Puccinia graminis Ug99, wiping out up to 30% of the world's rice crops in any given year. Dr. Talbot's work on the mechanisms by which the fungus initiates and spreads infection seems to hold tremendous promise in addressing the problem. Some of the proteomics involved are well beyond the scope of my understanding; I'm not a proteins person by any stretch. Still, even I can grasp that if one can come to an understanding of how the subcellular mechanics of infection work, there's real hope of coming up with a solution.

After the Karling lecture, I met up with Meredith Blackwell and handed her three dead beetles. That might be perceived as an insult in some circles, but not in this one. I'll be sending some live specimens her way in the near future, too, and hopefully we'll be able to exchange some data and materials. I'm particularly looking forward to continued contact with the people I've met from her lab. Even though I don't think I'll be part of the next round of AFTOL research, others in my lab will be and her lab will also be involved, and we're all working on bugs and fungus in one way or another.

I had dinner at a little Indian place called Kaarma just around the corner from my hotel. I was joined by labling RiGa, Dan Durall from the University of British Columbia Okanagan, and Kentaro Hosaka from the National Museum of Nature and Science of Japan. It was a very nice cap to what has been an inspiring few days for me. If you should find yourself in State College, PA, I recommend checking out Kaarma.

I have indeed come away from this conference feeling inspired. I've got some new ideas and am itching to try them out, particularly when I get back from Florida laden with new specimens. Stephanie Gross and I talked today about there being a coleoptera/fungi symbiosis session at next year's MSA meeting. There are a bunch of us out there, and all we need to do is be in the same place at the same time with material to present. The place next year will be Snowbird in Utah and the time will be July 25-30, 2009. Now all I need is the material.

I'll get back to work on that on Thursday.

For now, my priorities are sleep and then the long drive back to Worcester. Sequences await.

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Pigs' Ears from Pennsylvania: MSA Foray Finds

These are a few of the fungi I collected during yesterday's Mycological Society of America foray in Central Pennsylvania. It's only about half. Other people made some even more interesting finds. One lucky collector came up with a beautiful Sparassis crispa, but to me the most unusual specimen I saw in the lab was Amanita jacksonii, which I had thought to be an exclusively southern species. In fact, David Geiser mentioned that he's never seen one in Pennsylvania in the years he's been collecting here. I'd only seen the species in Florida previously, where it's fairly common (I've collected them on the Florida State University campus in the quad in front of the College of Business).

I came up with some Gomphus clavatus, which until yesterday I had seen only on the west coast. Perhaps certain basidiomycetes need a GPS even more than I do. They seem to be getting lost!

		First up is a particularly beautiful Amanita close to A. brunnescens. I'm not sure of the exact species, but people far more experienced than I advised that it's likely the best identification we'll get for this one without sequencing it and I'm unlikely to have time to do that in the near future. Whatever the exact species might be, though, the pellis is a particularly rich brown, the stipe does bruise slightly brown, and the mushroom has a faint odor of raw potato. The bulb is cleft, too, so it could well just be a particularly dark-pigmented A. brunnescens.
		This is admittedly not going to be a fungus that most people will gasp over in astonishment. Coltricia montagnei is much like the Coltricia cinnamomea I found at Wachusett almost two weeks ago, but the one you're seeing here is the largest Coltricia I've ever seen. This specimen was just over four inches in diameter, making it more of a fairy sofa than a fairy stool. When I first flipped it over to see if it was yet another of the endless Phellodon sp. that were everywhere in the woods, I thought it might be some deformed Suillus fruiting body... until I looked at its spores. A drop of KOH turned the surface black instantly, too.
		I believed that Gomphus clavatus, also known as the pig's ear chanterelle, was a western species, but here it is in Pennsylvania. These are young specimens. The more aged fruiting bodies nearby had lost all violet tones and looked a god deal more like pigs' ears than do the ones in this photo.
		All Doctor Who fans should appreciate this little ascomycete, Leotia viscosa, also called the green jelly baby. It's not quite as common as its pallid yellow sibling species, Leotia lubrica, but I think it's far more esthetically appealing.
		The polypore Phaeolus schweinitzii, on the other hand, is beloved only by certain slightly mad mycologists. Wrap your kitchen sponge in felt, soak it in water and give it a good squeeze and you'll know what this fungus feels like in one's hand. It readily incorporates bits of twigs, leaves, grass and anything else that gets in its way as the fruiting body expands, and despite its squishy consistency these beasts can get quite large. I found another specimen in addition to the one in this photo; my second collection was a foot in diameter. P. schweinitzii is not considered edible, but some people do extract dye from it, hence its common name of "dye polypore." Not even beetles seem tempted by this one, although I suppose I'll need to collect more of these spongy, oozy polypores before knowing whether that's always true. I didn't find any on yesterday's collections, though.

Among the fungi I found yesterday but don't show here are Cantharellus cibarius and C. ignicolor (too few to bother bringing home, though), a green-brown Hygrophorus with both stipe and cap covered with slippery slime, a very large Paxillus atrotomentosus that smelled quite spicy after landing on the dryer (it's not supposed to, but even I could smell this one!), a couple more Elaphocordyceps ophioglossoides, a proliferation of Geoglossum sp., numerous Spathularia, and probably a number of things I'm forgetting entirely. I also came up with Ganoderma tsuga, but I only wanted the Bolitotherus cornutus that were living in it. Elisabet, who had never seen it outside of a herbarium before, took the fruiting bodies for further study.

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Quick MSA Highlights from Yesterday

Yesterday's foray yielded lots of interesting specimens, some of which I've photographed. I don't have time to post the photos yet, but I'll get to it later today. My schedule is very, very full and the day's sessions start at 8:00 AM today. There's some good stuff early on that I really don't want to miss.

Having the opportunity to meet and talk with some of these people has been both enlightening and a great deal of fun. I finally got the chance to meet Tom Volk in person yesterday after having spoken to him quite a bit when I was trying to decide on a graduate program. My companions on much of yesterday's foray were Brandon Matheny (whose nose, despite having been moved recently to Tennessee, is as sharp as ever), Martin Ryberg and Elisabet Sjökvist. Elisabet is both a fellow polypore researcher and affable conversationalist; it was particularly enjoyable getting to know her as we oohed and aahed over everything from Gomphus to Paxillus.

I also spent a good deal of time with some current and former members of Meredith Blackwell's lab at LSU. While I'm researching beetles that live inside of fungi, Dr. Blackwell's lab working on fungi that live inside of beetles. Stephanie Gross, Maritza Abril, Sung-Oui Suh and I shot the breeze a bit at the foray and reception. I must say that Dr. Suh was remarkably dry for a man who had just driven all the way from South Korea. I may well take Stephanie up on her offer to collect tenebrionidae in her neck of the Gulf Coast so long as she's not wearing the belt made from passalid guts that's he's threatening to create. Insect innards may seem amusing for awhile, Stephanie, but wearing one's guts on the outside is a fashion faux pas of tremendous magnitude.

I also got to spend a good deal of time at the reception with Heather Hallen-Adams and Rod Tulloss talking about Amanita. Well, they talked and I mostly listened. I learned more about the genus while sitting at the table and picking at popcorn than I have a in all my time to date. One should always say nice things about Amanita specialists; they know things. Dangerous things. Luckily for those of us studying the benignly non-lethal polypores, that's an easy thing to do. Heather has particularly good taste in pets, by the way, being the caretaker of a very handsome panther chameleon (one should say nice things about Amanita experts' pets as well, you know).

More later. It's time for me to get ready to go to the AFTOL session.

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Finally in State College, PA

I really must keep in mind that drives to central Pennsylvania never take the 6 or 7 hours I think they will. I left Worcester at 10:30 AM and didn't get to my hotel until about 9:30. Traffic jams added a good deal of extra time.

I was considering having a drink down at the bar, but I don't even think I'm up for it. I have to be up early for tomorrow's foray; the bus departs from Penn State at 8 AM and as I don't know my way around I'll need to leave myself a bit of extra time.

I'm too road-weary to write anything coherent right now, but I am here. Thankfully, the hotel has given me a room right above a courtyard where students are drinking. I'm sure they'll lull me to sleep at any moment now.

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Off to Pennsylvania for MSA Meeting Today

I'll be hitting the road and Pennsylvania-bound in just a few hours for the Mycological Society of America conference at Penn State. My companion for the trip is a postdoc from the Pfister Lab at Harvard. Don Pfister is himself receiving an award from the MSA for excellence in teaching. Considering that the hapless postdoc will be trapped on the road with me for about seven hours, I fully expect some of that excellent knowledge to diffuse into my brainpan. In any case, I have to be careful around Harvard people. These ivy leaguers are a rowdy bunch.

The conference program looks excellent, with lots of interesting talks and posters. David Geiser is writing an unofficial conference blog. I'll be updating from the conference as well.

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No Wachusett Wednesday This Week

Due to inclement weather, this week's Wachusett Wednesday has been canceled. I am rather bummed about it. Instead of field work, I'll instead be purifying the PCR products from yesterday's gel and cleaning up/aligning the Sarcodon sequences, all of which is OK but hardly a substitute for being in the field.

In all likelihood, my next venture into the field will be on Sunday. That's the day of the Mycological Society of America foray at Lock Haven University. A lab and equipment is being graciously made available after the foray and throughout the duration of the conference, and I expect that I'll have wireless access at my hotel, so I'll be able to blog about the foray and provide photos and info about my collections as usual at that time.

sigh.

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Reasons to Be Cheerful: DNA, Expeditions and Mycological Society Meeting

It's the little things in life sometimes that bring the greatest pleasures... at least when one revels in being a geek.

The first thing I need to do today is to clean up some DNA I have waiting in the freezer. Among them are the rDNA sequences from Diaperis maculata. Once I've cleaned the DNA I'll be able to load it onto a plate and will get the sequences back and be able to add them to my alignments. I'll know a tiny bit more about the evolution of fungus-associated Coleoptera. This is enough to make me look forward to a Monday. It's the little things... and D. maculata is only 5-6 mm long. That qualifies as "little."

I also have to start work on securing permits for the collecting expedition in September. Two months should be enough lead time, hypothetically, but one never knows with bureaucracies. We just need a couple of good sites to work at, though. I'll probably put feelers out on more than we'll actually use. That way if the process gets too long and we get turned down for a couple of sites at the last minute, we'll still have a couple of back-ups. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Speaking of science-related travel, it's only a month until I hit the road for Penn State and the annual Mycological Society of America meeting. It's the largest gathering of professional and amateur mycologists in the nation and promises to be a great time. I'm looking forward to the whole program, but I have to admit that I'm particularly tickled by the opportunity to collect in Pennsylvania, a state in which I've never forayed before. I'm even hauling my industrial-strength dehydrator on the trip so that folks can preserve specimens. The abstracts look like there will be some very interesting talks on fungal evolution and informatics tools. Folks from my lab are doing four of the presentations, I think. I'm not one of them yet (I've just started gathering data!) There are also a couple of talks by David Maddison that look like they'll be particularly interesting stuff. Days of full immersion... I can hardly wait.

Are any readers planning to attend MSA this year? If so, I'd love to meet up for a drink or two.

If you're new to this stuff and this is the first you're hearing about it and you'd like to attend, you can still register for the meeting. Even if you're a novice, you couldn't ask for a better opportunity to learn about fungi. Please consider joining us! If you're a newbie and can make it in time for the foray on August 10, I'd be more than happy to hang out with you in the field and help you get better acquainted with the various chitinous life-forms you'll encounter. I'd consider it a privilege to do so, in fact.

Today, and the next couple of months, are going to be great. Wonder-Geek Powers Activate!

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Thanksgiving 2007

LL and I spent Thanksgiving with my family. We started out with Thanksgiving dinner in upstate New York and then moved on to another Thanksgiving in central Pennsylvania at the Nittany Mountain KOA camp, which is owned by my sister-in-law and her partner. Yes, two Thanksgiving dinners. I don't remember the last time I ate so much. My family is rather non-traditional; aside from my sister and brother-in-law, nobody is married to one another, so we're all partners, but still family. I'm not sure what that means, if anything, but I think we've all sort of come to the same conclusions about the institution of marriage in general. It's an unusually diverse group of people, too, in terms of ethnicity and education and everything else. We're certainly not the typical 2.2-kids middle class model. We can certainly eat, though.

LL and I stayed in the cabin shown above. One of the first people we met at the camp was a nearby camper who goes by the name of Snooky. Snooky is obsessed with blowing leaves. He spends whole days, from sunrise to sunset, with his leaf blower. Things could be worse, I suppose... he could be obsessed with an axe. To say the guy is eccentric is probably an understatement. Meeting him made me wonder if Stephen King has ever written a story about a leaf blowing maniac.

Of course, there were other things to do beside blowing leaves. My niece, for instance, prefers playing miniature golf to just about anything else. She has her own rules for the game, the first of which is "I win!" When she got tired, she had the good fortune of free and unlimited access to the camp store, so she could always "sugar up" on candy and hot cocoa when she started getting tired. I've sat through hurricanes that packed less energy than that kid. For her, the long weekend consisted of miniature golf, Spongebob and sugar. Oh, and telling all the adults how to play whatever game she made up at the moment. It's too bad none of us had nearly the same energy she does.

There's a petting zoo at the camp. LL made friends with a couple of goats. My niece, for whatever reasons, wasn't generally too interested in the animals. Not all of the animals present were from the petting zoo; my brother-in-law's mother (my aunt-in-law? I still don't know the proper kinship term) brought along her pug, Zeus. Also present was a ridiculously friendly three-legged cat; he lost the fourth leg in a jaw trap some years ago and makes do with the remaining limbs as best he can. There was also a very hyperactive Maltese named CD and a few other critters lurking about.

What family gathering would be complete without at least one faux pas? Ours took the form of a social misstep by my sister-in-law's partner's daughter's boyfriend (I dare anyone to give me the kinship term for that relationship!) delivering a line about how mean Arabs are while LL was sitting at the table. This was made a bit funnier by the fact that the guy is half Italian and half Jamaican himself and was meeting the family for the first time. It was all taken in stride with good humor and a quick comeback from LL resulting in a blush and an embarrassed "Oh, are you Arab?" from Alfredo, the boyfriend in question. I don't think anyone will be letting him live that one down anytime soon.

We stayed at the camp and ate ridiculously well through Saturday night, then left early on Sunday morning to begin the trip home. I decided to take a detour through Binghamton on the way to check out a few places that were part of my life about 20 years ago when I lived up there. The first stop was at 160 Conklin Avenue, a house that I lived in during my first stint at university. I lived there with five other students, including one girlfriend, in a sort of commune that resulted in the place being called Helter Shelter. There were a lot of drugs and craziness. The place is essentially the spot where my life absolutely went to pieces and I felt a need to revisit the site of the most traumatic time in my existence. It hasn't changed at all. In fact, it looks as if it hasn't seen so much as a coat of paint since I left in 1988. To me, it seems a dark, brooding, decaying place, perhaps a bit Lovecraftian in its presence. It's like a combination of fossil and historic landmark in my life. Standing there at the corner of Conklin and John was surreal; I felt as if I were dreaming, especially because LL was there with me. My room in the house was the one with the windows just above the door in this photo. The door itself was the spot where, in 1987, a guy named Jimmy Puccio drank a votive candle full of hot wax thinking it was a shot of tequila and then passed out. He's probably long forgotten about the incident, wherever he is now. If there were such a thing as ghosts, this house would certainly be haunted by the spirits of many acid trips, not to mention some devastating heartbreaks. I wouldn't want to be the poor slobs living in it now in that case. In my mind, at least, this is a place with much mojo.

After my pilgrimage to Helter Shelter, I headed to the SUNY Binghamton campus. Everything was closed and parking was no problem. We visited College-in-the-Woods, dorms I'd been tossed out of years ago after my roommate and I accidentally set a fire in Oneida Hall that got the place evacuated at 4 AM in the middle of a winter night. You see, we wanted to find out whether Bacardi 151 was really flammable, so we filled the cap of a peanut butter jar with the stuff and lit it. It ignited, of course... and then my roommate jerked his hand away and knocked over the entire bottle onto my desk. That set off the alarms and destroyed a couple of my textbooks and all of my notebooks, too. The next day, we were told that we could no longer live on campus. We wound up finding a place in Johnson City, right on Main Street. That's what's shown in the image to the right; our apartment was the top floor of the building to the right of the one with the "1892" decoration on the top. I lived there for about a year with my roommate, Duncan, as well as the son of the Fijian ambassador to the United States. After that year, I took some time off from school. By the time I got back, Duncan had graduated and I wound up living at Helter Shelter. The store with the blue awning, now a clothing store, used to be a sub shop called The Pig Out. It had the best spiedies in all of Broome County, and I'd been hoping to take LL there, but it's gone. Actually, most of the storefronts on Main Street are empty these days. Downtown Johnson City is a very sad, desolate place. Even Fat Cat Books, an institution for Triple Cities comic book and RPG fans, moved out of downtown. The building it once occupied, just across the street from my old apartment, now sits empty.

We spent some time poking around the area and then got back on the road home. Along the way, we got hungry and stopped for lunch in Cobleskill. Not wanting to hit the usual fast food places, LL chose our lunch spot, a diner on route 9 attached to the Colonial Motel — the Diner Motel. Not the Motel Diner, mind you, but the Diner Motel. Seeing that they'd gotten the name wrong on the sign, we probably should have known better than to eat there... but we went ahead and did it anyhow. I ordered grilled chicken on a pita, expecting something like a gyro. What I got was a piece of grilled chicken on a pita and nothing else. This was easily the most literal lunch I've ever eaten. It was exactly one piece of chicken breast on half of a pita with no lettuce, no tomato, no onions, no nothing. LL ordered a proper gyro, but that was bland and useless, too. After lunch, we agreed that the best thing about the food we'd just had was that it probably wouldn't make us sick.

Because our own GPS unit is in the shop for repairs, we were traveling with a loaner. Quick qord of advice here; avoid the Mio GPS like the plague. We told the thing to avoid toll roads and, as if to punish us, it took us on the most backwards, time-wasting route home possible. At one point we even wound up on a dirt road (Tory Hill Road) somewhere near Central Brunswick, NY. We were trying to avoid taking the Mass Pike, but we finally gave in and took it and paid for that mistake by getting stuck in a traffic jam that easily added close to hours to our trip. We finally got off 90 and picked up 20... but that was backed up, too. The final insult came when we got off 20 and onto Stafford Road, just a couple of miles from home. I was pulled over by a cop because I had a license plate frame. No kidding; license plate frames are technically illegal in Massachusetts, and this particular cop decided to stop me because of it. Luckily, he gave me a warning instead of a ticket. By that time, though, we'd been on the road for more than twelve hours. Ugh. We left New Columbia, PA at 6:00 AM. By the time we got back to Worcester, it was 8:30 PM. It was an awful trip. Next year, we'll do things differently. I don't know how, but I'm not doing that haul on a holiday weekend ever again.

The weekend was great, the road trip sucked, and I'm now functioning on 3.5 hours of sleep, having awakened at 1:30 this morning for no good reason I can fathom. I have to teach lab until 9:00 tonight, too. It's going to be a looooooooooooong day.

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