Thursday Salmagundi

We've had a run of dry, sunny days here, but not quite with full August heat (except for last weekend). This week has seen low- to mid-80s F. for highs and remarkably cool temps at night. I have lunch out on the deck if I can, and walk around the neighborhood in the late afternoon if I can do that. Declining summer, it is. School starts in less than two weeks, and I've already seen peewee footballers out practicing in parks, a little earlier than I remember in other years.

It's been six years this week since we moved into this house with a deck. I did some poking around not long ago, and it seems like the theoretical value of the house since 2003 has described a path that pretty much looks like the Matterhorn. Or at least the Matterhorn as it appeared in an old Donald Duck comic -- smoothly up to a point, then back down again. The real question now is whether it's any lower than in 2003.

I don't intend to find out. Child incubation, the main point of having a suburban house, isn't finished yet.

Got some borderline spam today from someone encouraging me to play a geography quiz associated with Facebook. No thanks. Can't muster the desire to do quizzes on Facebook, though other people are welcome to them. I usually find that geoquizzes are either too easy (what's the capital of France?) or too hard (name the eight countries on the migration route of the coconut-laden African swallow).

I persuaded Lilly to take an online U.S. states geoquiz recently, one that gives you three chances to match the correct name with the correct state. Guess it on the first try and you get three points. A correct second try gives you two points and the third gives you one. A perfect score would be 150. She got 113, or about 75 percent. Not bad, but I told she needs to know all the states by the time she gets to junior high.

Two other oddities I forgot to mention about Star Trek in a recent posting. One was McCoy's motivation for joining Star Fleet -- a divorce had left him destitute. Really? That kind of thing happens in a world of no poverty and full gender equality? Besides, he's a doctor, dammit. You'd think he'd be able to find a job of some kind, unless the movie's trying to make some point about the long-term (really long-term) impact of socialized medicine.

Also, in passing, I heard Capt. Pike tell the young Kirk that the Enterprise was being built at the Riverside Dock, or Shipyard, or something. I know I heard Riverside. A tip of the hat to Riverside, Iowa, which calls itself the future birthplace of Capt. Kirk, just because no place else had thought of it first? Some years ago, I drove through Riverside and managed to see this, but not this.