Six Thoughts From Maine

1) In our car ride on the way up to Maine from school the convo was lively, but on the way back it was dead. This makes sense in terms of excitedness--people were looking forward to seeing family and relaxing over break but not to returning to the humdrum of school work. When people are excited they will talk more. This is helpful to watch for if you're trying to gauge the atmosphere in a room.

2) If you go to a barn party, bring a jacket because the insulation will be awful.

3) If you're in a bad mood one of the worst things that can happen is to be made fun of in front of a group of people. When this happens to you, the ones you will be most annoyed with are not those who actually are saying the joke but the others around who are "merely" laughing. As if they were innocent!

4) Are the lyrics to Phoenix's song 1901 "fall in" or "fold it" during the chorus? The first Google results give are mixed, indicating a lively debate. The real answer is "ballin'." Listen for yourself; they couldn't be singing anything else. The word is out of place but the band seems hipster enough to pull it off.

5) Hypothesis: Cops don't want to pull anyone over when it's raining.

6) Eastwood's Changeling (2008, #226) is a classic example of how it doesn't matter to the state whether the child has a biological relationship to the parent but it usually matters a great deal to the parent. The LAPD says, "Mrs. Collins, he has nowhere else to go." Mrs. Collins says, "Fuck them, and the horse they came in on." Thus it is an especially relevant movie for the recent push for mandatory paternity testing, as it represents an example of state-sponsored cuckoldry from the female perspective instead of the more typical male perspective.

(Thanks to Max, Brian, and Nick for stimulating conversations about these)