The Reading Journal of RMS

Things here are going well again!

1. We watched the latest Futurama movie last night -- The Beast with a Billion Backs -- and it was pretty funny. Definitely better than the first one, mostly because they'd managed to write a 90-minute plot, rather than two 45-minute plots shoe-horned together. Also, it had the line, "Less invasions, more equations!" Awesome.
   
   
2. I am feeling pretty upbeat about Biden as VP! At the very least, the VP debates should be entertaining. But the eeee! had signed up for the text message alert (and boy, was that an epic fail -- glad I wasn't on the east coast), and on Thursday night, while we were sleeping, he got a text message about a gamma ray burst. The noise of his phone receiving a text message made it into my dream, and so when I woke up Friday morning, I was convinced that the VP announcement had been made, and that it was Chris Dodd. I was even trying to have a conversation about it with the eeee! -- "That should be an interesting statement on civil liberties!" -- and he had no earthly idea what I was talking about.
   
   Mostly, I want to know why my subconscious picked Chris Dodd. How random!
   
   
3. My dad is a Scranton native, and apparently spent all day yesterday watching the Biden coverage. Awesome. Hometown boy makes good!
   
   
4. A bunch of my cousins left birthday greetings for me on Facebook, and when I was listing them off to my mom, she thought it was really nice and sweet that they had all remembered my birthday. I had to explain to her that any time you go to Facebook, it tells you whose birthday it was. But that did not deter her.
   
   
5. My parents are not particularly fazed by me turning 29 ("Next year I'll be 30!") because my dad turns 60 in three weeks. Eeep!
   
   

So! I'm painting my toenails and LJing and blogging and we're going out to lunch and there's a cookout tonight and Newcastle was $12.99 for a 12-pack and work is going well. Not bad for a birthday.

My dad loves Joe Biden. I mean, loooooooooooves him for reasons I've never been entirely clear on. Certainly in 2004, my dad was grousing because Biden wasn't running for president.

So I see that Biden has thrown his hat into the ring, and my first thought was, "Okay, well, Dad will be happy about that." Then I thought, "Why does he like Biden so much? What, is he from Scranton or something?"

Sure enough, Biden is originally from Scranton. Ha! My officemate didn't quite appreciate why I was laughing so hard, so I had to email the eeee! and call my brother, who both appreciated the bit of trivia.

And I must confess that I can't fast-forward through the opening credits of The Office, and I'm not even from Scranton. I sometimes get excited about the little details, like the University of Scranton banner on someone's desk (my dad's alma mater!), or Dwight having tons of fireworks in his car (the amount of fireworks that people -- including my relatives -- set off for 4th of July in Scranton is really insane).

I don't even like Scranton, and I have this bizarre attachment to it, so maybe it's not so weird that my dad is still a civic booster, nearly 35 years after moving away.