Apologies from Out West

You may have noticed, if you care at all any more at this point, but there was neither a "No TV Wednesday Post" nor a Sunday NFL musing. Many apologies. Last Wednesday I left to drive across the Midwest in preparation for a professional conference in Phoenix. These conferences consist of academic types sharing and debating their (wait, "our") latest work in a variety of formats, and generate in me, in equal thirds, the following reactions:

Reaction 1: This is completely fascinating! I am very interested in this particular paper/subject/speaker and this inspires new directions in my own scholarship.

Reaction 2: I am quite possibly the most illiterate, empty-minded, poorly-read, inattentive, and generally stupid person on the planet, as I have just sat through the reading of yet another paper which made, literally, no sense to me at all. None.

Reaction 3: This is a whole damn lot of intellectual self-pleasuring that has little or no application to anything that matters in the known universe (including on as-yet-undiscovered planets with their as-yet-undiscovered life forms), and most of the time I'm not even sure that the speakers really understand or believe the academibabble that they're spewing.

Oh, and Reaction 4, which sort of informs all three previous reactions: My career may or may not depend on schmoozing / networking / drinking with some / all of these people. Sigh.

So that happened. And there was no internet in my hotel room, hence the silence.

But! There is internet in my current hotel room, here at Grand Canyon, (park literature does not use the word "the" to preface the canyon, as though it were a canyon discovered by William Grand or something) where my dad and I are earning our stripes as burly hiking men and really just enjoying the hell out of ourselves at this Big Damn Hole in the Ground. There will be a forthcoming post about Grand Canyon adventures, specifically today's Twelve-mile hike down the delightfully-named Bright Angel Trail into the canyon and to the forgettably-named Plateau Point. Or maybe it was called Peninsula Plateau. Promontory Place? Anyway, it was a stellar hike. More on this later.