Dang: dervish time. Finished a year of archiving the written word, finished an hour of  digitizing the 90s videos, burned a DVD, all the while cleaning up the Halloween decorations and stuffing them in the bulgy orange bin. I listened to the radio all morning long, wondering what I would write my column about – and when column time came I had my subject: campaign ads. I take a brave, bold, stance! They irritate me! Next column: people who don’t signal their turns, and kids who wear caps in a disrespectfully insouciant manner.

Part of the digitizing project involves  8mm tape from the DC era, and I stumbled across a Smithsonian press conference I attended in 1992.

I met them all later at the press-only tour of the Trek exhibit. Go on, laugh if you care, but this was a Great Event in my life up to this point - to see them all assembled in this place, and shake their hands afterwards: nerd nirvana. It was like the Ultimate Geek World Series team with DiMaggio and Koufax and Aaron and the rest.

Nimoy had the Spock groove going the entire time; Shatner was humbled:

Scotty was looking at a panel that showed a 17 percent drop in the efficiency of the dilithium matrix; Pavel was in partial Dondi mode:

In the exhibit, one reporter (that is NOT me) committed sacriledge, sitting in The Chair to scribble his notes. Fie, sir. Fie.

They were all the nicest people, except for You Know Who; he breezed in and out and hit the limo. Everyone else stayed and slopped up the gush with genuine smiles. Happy day.

Noon came. I wrote a column. Then I sped to work to pick up material for the Toy Bag feature I’m writing. Seven weekly pieces on Xmas toys, with Gnat as my co-reviewer. That makes seven pieces a week now. Why? As I’ve said: in a declining industry, it makes sense to be seen as highly useful. When I checked the Strib internal website I noted that today was flu shot day, so I decided to head down and get poked. Instant trepidation – even though last year’s shot at the Target Clinic involved naught but a transitory prick, I still have the childhood dread of SHOTS, and the idea of volunteering for one is still peculiar. But it’s the right thing to do. So. I went down to one of the converence rooms (half of the entire second floor is devoted to conference rooms) and queued for the jab. Since we are not in the middle of a deadly pandemic, the room had a mild temperate tone; no shuffling lines of citizens whose faces are lined with grief and care, hoping the quick stick will keep them from the vast burning graves on the edge of town. But since I was about to be pierced with a sharp metal point, I jabbered. Can’t help it.

Hello, nurse, how are you? Busy day? Getting repetitive stress injury to your tendons from all the injectioning? Ha ha ha ha! Yes, I’ve had a shot, no, didn’t have any effects, no problem, got a shot last year at Target, really thin needles they didn’t hurt at all,  you do have the thin needles don’t you oh of course! Ha ha ha ha – oh, let me roll up my sleeve . . . relax my arm? It is relaxed. Seriously. Why thank you. Push ups. I do 200 a night, ANYWAY

Somewhere in there I got the shot, and it was nothing. It made the plucking of a nose hair feel like an amputation in a Civil War hospital. Not that you should pluck nose hairs; you could get a brain infection. (I read that once.)

Home. Did the start of the Diner, picked up Gnat, hit the grocery store for large wet slabs of ham. Did homework and piano practice; napped on the sofa for 14 minutes, then distributed ham to the members of the family. Walked the dog in the dark lly night, aka 6:20 PM, then finished the Diner. Nice to have it under my belt a day in advance. Wrote a column. Scanned some stuff. Resized the video captures. Split the atom.  Did more piano practice. Crammed for tomorrow’s spelling test. (School ends on Thursday; no school Friday. Again. Somehow the end of the quarter magically yields a three-day weekend.) (In all fairness, I have no doubt her teacher will spend the day preparing for Monday.) Now I’m going to watch some Deadwood – season effing 2, which is effing more of the effing same, I efffing gather, you cogeffer. I think the scriptwriters have a random F-bomb distribution algorithm they use to insert profanity into the script, and while I think they could dial it down a notch it doesn’t intrude the way it did at first. Not always, anyeffinway.

Lots of genial disagreement and the occasional assent for the tossed-off notes on the Kerry remarks; I still hold to my initial impression, but of course I can see how others took a different interpretation. I defer to the opinions of soldiers and relatives of soldiers, since, by the modern calculus, they have Absolute Moral Standing in these matters. But I did find this screen grab interesting – I assume it was a version of the speech handed out to reporters before the event,, which is commonplace. If it’s accurate, it confirms what I thought he was trying to say. It’s possible to view this outside of what people think Kerry has expressed before – gaffe-wise, sometimes a cigar is just a cigre. I mean zagar. I meant cigar, and it’s clear I meant cigar, and I will not sit here and have my spelling challenged by people who never correctly rattled off the letters in “antidisestablishmentarianism” while half in the bag on a bet in college. In any case, I don’t have any Outrage over the matter because I don’t particularly care what Sen. Kerry says, and don’t see him as a relevant actor in modern politics. I understand why great amounts of hay is being thrashed over the matter, this being an election season. I understand how some are using the gaffe to draw attention to a greater point re: the hard left’s attitudes towards the military, but if that wasn’t actually the point Kerry was making then I can’t jump on board and affirm the greater point. That smacks of fake-but-accurate. Is it more germaine than the horrid revelation of the GOP cloakroom Hellfire Club exposed in the Foleygate scandal, which proves that no one who doesn't support repealing the tax cuts can be trusted to deal with Iran? Your call.

I’ll probably talk about this on the Hewitt show tomorrow, and get my arse handed to me. Ah well.  New Quirk, and new Fargo served up in fragmented form: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Ancient expensive cards from the postcard show. Money resumes tomorrow. See you then!