polymania

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Kanorado

Cindy and I drove back from Kansas City today. Some ideas and musings that we had in the 10+ hours it took to get home...

K-State. We passed the exit for Manhattan, home of KSU. I recounted for Cindy my lone experience there, from 8th grade as a visiting member of a student orchestra, over 20 years ago. It's such a contrast to my experiences with KU in Lawrence, where I went dozens of times, including high school music camps and visits with relatives who were students there. It's funny to me (actually Cindy) how KSU is so vilified in my family circle, when in reality it's just a mid-sized state university in a remote small town in central Kansas.
The Sternberg Museum in Hays, KS. We stopped here for a pleasant hour-long visit during the trip back today. It's a somewhat ironic museum, through no fault of its own, if only because it is one with a fine collection of prehistoric fossils smack dab in the center of a state whose Board of Education makes dismissive, sneering commentary at the notions of biological evolution and Deep Time.
Exit 272, I-70 KS. Here, just outside Abilene, you'll find the "Lion's Den" adult superstore, whose large signpost is flanked by billboards put up by the local church pleading people not to go in there. The billboards have a quote to the effect that God is everywhere, watching everything. Presumably that includes God surveying the latest content offered on the racks inside the store. No prurient interest of course - merely factfinding, just like the store shoppers. In any case, why do such strongly Republican states like Kansas and Wyoming have such successful porn vendors there? I guess that's your wholesome red-state values in a nutshell.
An extremely windy day in western KS for our drive, with lots of tumbleweeds blowing evocatively across the freeway. Cindy got to wondering what a tumbleweed looks like, and where they grow, before they go a-tumbling. I have no idea - I never see areas that have bushes that look anything like potential tumbleweeds. I guess I'll have to look that up sometime.
To kill time on the drive we started talking about TV shows we watched as kids. (We've talked about this before, but never in such detail.) What shocked us both was the length of the list of shows we both watched - how did we ever do anything but watch TV, having seen all that television?
You can see Pikes Peak from I-70 as far as 15 miles east of Limon. My estimate from looking at my Raven map of Colorado is that that mountaintop is 88 miles away at that point. For some reason I just love factoids like that.