Digital Analogue

Small town life

So now I'm once again a permanent resident of Illinois. I love my small town! I bought a paper on Sunday after church, and I can read the entire thing through. That's just not possible with the Daily Herald or the Trib or any of those big-city papers. I can get my national and international news off the web, but I enjoy sitting down and reading a paper straight through, and that's how I can get my local news.

They published my letter this week, too. My first full day, and already I'm duking it out on the op-ed page. Heh.

This morning they had a Labor Day parade. The local high schools had their marching bands in there, and the local gymnastics and dance studios, and 4-H and such. A lot of the groups were, predictably, unions. And there were no less than four groups marching with progressive messages on boards: "NAFTA took my daddy's job", "peace is patriotic", "fair trade", etc. There were, I think, two or three Democratic Party groups. No Republicans in evidence, no pro-war anything on any of the floats. The Midwest---even or especially Small Town, USA---is a much more complicated place than a lot of folks on the coasts give it credit for. I really feel like I've come home here.

No less than three people today have referred to me either as "faculty" or "professor", and I have to fight the urge to look behind me to see who they're talking about.

And now I'm sitting in my office in SMC at Knox, typing up the last few busy days for the blog. Four entries in total, and now I'm caught up. I've updated the timestamps so that new times will be in CDT, and I've updated the tagline and descriptions to fit my new position.

"I know that physics conventions are sort of blacklisted from Vegas these days. Of course, I think that had more to do with the fact that physicists know too much math to do a lot of gambling, but I think the prostitutes may also have been underutilized." --Chris Sedlack