Eh, I guess the internet is where everybody goes to pretend they're still in the 6th grade lunchroom. I've long said grownups are just 10-year-olds who are afraid to be called a 10-year-old in front of their friends, so they act much older. Adults slip up a lot -- petty arguments, random misunderstandings, sitting and staring into space for minutes at a time, making offensive jokes about mentally handicapped people, preferring Doritos to carrots, and so forth. When their slipup is pointed out as childish, they try to defend themselves, or at least mark it in their memory to remember, "don't do that again - they've seen through my ruse!" Me, I'm more advanced than that, I just find a deep ironic humor, reminiscent of Hunter Thompson's iconic Rolling Stone interview with Bill Clinton in 1991, in all LOLCats that makes me giggle like a 10-year-old when I spend hours browsing them on various websites. Nothing juvenile about that, not at all.

So, we went to Wisconsin this weekend -- passing through construction at 11pm isn't so bad, but on the return trip we were greeted, at the same stretch of road, by a blinking sign warning 1-hour delays. We pull off at the next exit, take potty breaks, and ask our TomTom for a new route. That "TomTom" would be the beat-up road atlas that I got from my insurance company for free in 1998 (he just likes to be called that to not feel obsolete). It was far more eloquent than the TomToms and Garmans in the commercials, and infomred me that we weren't very far from Old US 10. So with a hop, skip, and a jump, we changed our plans and decided to go see some new roads. We'd already stopped at several rummage sales, so we hoped to continue our luck. Sadly, it was too late in the day for sales, but we did get to see some cool things, wandering through sleepy downtowns and church graveyards. The biggest discoveries, however, were in the transportation category: we got excellent gas mileage by going only 60, our road-time was about the same, and getting out and stretching our legs helped our attitude a whole bunch. I'm going to dig out an old atlas of mine, pre-Interstate, scan it and put it up at Infomercantile as alternate long-distance routes for enjoyment and energy conservation. Those fuel taxes that make our pocketbooks feel so empty are doing their work at the local level: the highways we were on were better quality than the interstate roads. Leave the interstate to commercial vehicles, go see those sleepy little towns that were injured by the Interstate but rebounded by repurposing themselves as places to stay rather than pass through.