If you send a damned fool [driver] to Saint Louis, and you don’t tell them he’s a damned fool [driver], they’ll never find out. – Mark Twain from Life on the Mississippi

The preceeding paraphrase of a Mark Twain quote probably doesn’t do the quote justice, but it aptly describes my driving experience on Friday evening.  After a day at work, where things didn’t go as planned, some nice surprises, some not so nice, I headed home.  I got about halfway home when I hit a wall of traffic.  There was a lot going on Friday night, a country music concert (Martina McBride and Trace Adkins) and a basketball game or two.  So everybody and their brother wanted to go downtown.  “Let’s all take the New I-64!”, they collectively thought.  This group think quickly plugged that road and by the time that I arrived, south bound I-170 was backed up too.  It took me an hour to get home Friday, on Thursday it had only taken twenty minutes.  What made me groan the most though was the realization that this summer for every Cardinal home baseball game this scene would be repeated.

Tragedy struck on Wednesday at 3:30 AM in Sauget, Illinois.  Dave’s high school classmate and friend, Marty Lampe, was murdered in a carjacking.  He was waiting in someone else’s car outside a liquor store.  You could say that he shouldn’t have been where he was.  I prefer to say that he was way to young to die.  Marty’s funeral service is today.  God bless him.

I shouldn’t be so down on Saint Louis.  It really is a nice town.  I wouldn’t have lived here for thirty years, if I didn’t thinks so.  Maybe I just tired.  I think that I’ll go watch some basketball now. 

…

Well Don, private Facebook conversations don’t really work with a blogger.  Ohio State lost.  Yeah!  Michigan State won.  YEAH!  Ron, you weren’t a party to Don’s missives, but how well did your Purdue fare?  😉

Let’s change the subject: Slate had this interesting article on Friday, that posed this question, “When did people start wearing clothes? ” What I found interesting about it was the way they formulated an answer.  They used body lice. 

Apparently, genetic testing has not only been a boon to just CSI investigators, but also to dusty old archeologists.  (Not you, Sam or Janet*)  According to the article, about a 100,000 years ago the genetic record of body lice (who keeps these records?) showed the first differentiation between human body lice and body lice of those other creatures.  Slate explains that since modern human body lice live (if you can really call it a living) in people’s clothes, then humans must have started wearing clothes about then.

Fossil records only show human bone, that far back.  Tools, bone and horn needles exist from 40,000 years ago.  I find it interesting that a parasite can be put to such good use.  Maybe there is hope for the mosquito yet?

*Knock, knock  Who’s there?  Sam and Janet  Sam and Janet who?  Sam and Janet evening.