Little is more impressive in this world than a well-turned dinosaur simile:

Thank you Helen Hunt Jackson.

It makes me angry sometimes to think about spending time and money and creative energy on things involving outer space.

It makes me want to high five everyone I see when I hear about advances in paleontological research.

Is that hypocritical?

Those people are wrong.

Dinosaurs used to breathe and eat and poop and hang out. On the earth.

Just sayin.

I speak Chinese.  I can understand a lot of Spanish (but when I try to speak it, Chinese usually comes out).  I can handle food and restaurant situations pretty well in Italian.  I can answer the phone in Korean and Mongolian.  And, now, this....

I think the stegosaurus is a hoax.

I mean seriously.  Nothing about this animal makes sense.  Nothing.

Joe de Grazia, my dad, makes his internet debut...

And, Paul Hughes, since I know you're reading this, I mean it 100% lovingly when I call you a mad raver.

Note the Grateful Dead logo on the cabinet between our heads.  Parker drew that baby when he was like 11.  I love it.  We feature Led Zeppelin and Phish art in this kitchen too.

And note Pops's last comment about thinning our own herds.  Yikes.  He's not really that crazy.  Just a rookie video blogger looking to make a name for himself.

In fourth and fifth grade, I refused to read books.  Almost without exception (I think I might have half-assedly skimmed a Matt Christopher novel or two).  Every book report type assignment was a work of imagination and imagination alone.  I'd look at the picture on a book's front cover.  I'd read the notes on the back cover.  I'd flip through and remember chapter titles.  I'd read the first and last few pages.  And I'd make the rest up.

I think.  That's how I remember it anyway.  Which also might be a work of my imagination.

But, regardless, in sixth grade, everything, whatever that was, changed.

I read Jurassic Park, on my own, for fun, and I loved every word of it.

I loved it so much I started reading.  I think Andromeda Strain came next.  Then maybe Rising Sun.  And Sphere.  And The Great Train Robbery. 

And books by other authors as well.  Catch-22, eventually.  Then it was ON.  I'd had my next big reading epiphany: that the best literature didn't have to connect in some way to dinosaurs. 

And then came the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test epiphany: that journalism could be literature. 

And then Ken Kesey.  And Borges.  And Vonnegut.  And Hunter S. Thompson.  And Baldwin.  And Nabokov.  And now Steinbeck.  Epiphanies every one of them.  Epiphanies tracing back to Jurassic Park.

Michael Crichton was a strange and controversial and fascinating guy.  And he died day before yesterday. 

He taught me to read, and I wish I could have thanked him in person for that.

It still freaks me out that people in this country are afraid to vote for vegetarians .

Roy Brown ended up losing his election by more than 30 percentage points, so, most likely, he wouldn't have had a chance even if he was a velociraptor.*  His convincing victory in Sweet Grass County, however, was quite incriminating.

*Note: What's the opposite of a vegetarian?  A cannibal?