That's just wrong...

I stopped at the grocery store on my way home and was mortified to see this:



I realize that Disney would like to make more money and continue their quest for world domination by finding new and more profitable branding opportunities, but the last thing I want to think about when feeding the dog is that someday I might have to go out back and shoot him.

A few weeks of catching up

I'm so behind, but we're in our busy "get all the freshmen into rooms" time at work, so most nights I come home and read and try to decompress, but that means I'm not updating, which is sad because I've been on so many adventures!

Saturday, June 19

Bryan and I headed to Oak Ridge for the Secret City Festival, when the town celebrates their somewhat unique history, which I've talked about before. Oak Ridge was constructed entirely in secret during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project, and not revealed to the rest of the United States until the war was over. The town didn't even have a name until 1949.

The main point of the trip for us was taking the bus tour to the now decommissioned K-25 plant:



K-25 was the main facility for separating and enriching uranium, using a gaseous diffusion process. At the time of its construction, it was the largest building in the world, and when running at full operating capactity it used 7% of the total electricity generated in the entire United States, and somehow this was all kept secret, which is mindblowing in the internet age. The tour mainly drove around the outside of the facility:



but did go right up to the factory, which has been offline for over 40 years and slowly crumbling:





I would love to walk around in there, but it's all still classified and we weren't allowed off the bus. Exploring would take quite a while, though, because the building is huge. It's U-shaped, and each leg of the U is a half mile long. The tour guide, who worked in it, said that they used to ride around the upper floors on bicycles because it was the fastest way to get from one end to the other.

After the tour we went to the Secret City Festival itself:



where we looked at things we did not buy:



and I got this muffin pan that makes corn muffins that look like ears of corn:



I was very excited about the pan, even after my friend Sandy pointed out that they have those at Target, because mine was cheaper than the one at Target and I love cornbread. Actually using it turned out to be not as fun as anticipating using it was, as I discovered the next day.

Sunday, June 20

I've never baked in cast iron before, and there were a few mistakes. Some of them could have been predicted, like me forgetting that baked goods expand in the oven:



Next time I need to fill each well with a spoon, and only fill them about halfway up. As much as I could have predicted that, though, there was no way I could have realized that when everyone said, "Use some oil on the pan before you put the batter in" they actually meant "Grease the hell out of it! Use about five times as much oil as you think you need, and it still won't be enough!"

Those muffins did not want to come out of the pan:



This was the closest I got, and it only vaguely resembles an ear of corn:



A sad, broken ear. It's the hunchbread all over again, and will clearly require more practice.

Thursday, June 24

We went out for a going away dinner for my friend George, who is going away to Thailand to teach English, and who is writing a blog about it. We went to the Little Bangkok restaurant, which used to be a Ruby Tuesday's and still has all of the Ruby Tuesday's decor inside with a couple of vaguely Asian statues thrown in for good measure.

I had pad Thai with tofu, and it was delicious:



Friday, June 25

We went out to see the Smokies play ball, and I didn't realize that it was going to be Michael Jackson tribute night, which turned out to be as tragic as some people claim Michael's death was. Before the game there was a "Thriller" tribute dance performance, featuring a Michael Jackson impersonator in a suit apparently made of red garbage bags dancing around a Lisa Turtle from "Saved by the Bell" impersonator:



They were joined by a flock (pack? throng? horde?) of zombies that oddly included only one guy:





I seem to have been the only one who thought it was a little morbid to see someone pretend to be a zombie of a person who is actually dead as a tribute to that person. It just seems off to me.

The rest of the game was fun, as our summer intern got to answer trivia questions on the jumbotron and won a CD that I've since heard is pretty terrible:



and then they shot off fireworks from the outfield:





It generated a lot of smoke:



but I was the only one in our group bothered by this, as well. I guess I'm just more sensitive.

Saturday, June 26

My friend Aaron got married to Stacie the day after baseball, in a pretty church:



with the shortest wedding ceremony I have ever attended, including in high school when my friend Melissa got married at city hall. There were no readings, no lengthy prayers, no full mass like at Catholic weddings, just a prayer, vows, prayer, kiss, and then we were out. It was kind of refreshingly short, but still touching and heartfelt (especially when Aaron got all choked up during his vows), and I was happy to be there even though it did mean skipping the Pride Festival.

I think I might be straight now.

OK, no, but it was still a nice wedding with a nice reception:







and a good time spent with friends, even if the air conditioning was broken.

Friday, July 2

I was walking back from Starbucks, having met Jeannie for a quick breakfast iced white mocha that I didn't need but wanted anyway, when I noticed that someone had stencil spray painted a murder of crows on the side of the Humanities Building:





I liked the red bird stuck in among the rest:



but feel that it was unnecessary. The painting was striking enough on its own, and added a sense of motion and charm to a plain brick facade. As a university employee, I should probably also say that I think vandalism of university property is a horrible crime and needs to be dealt with as seriously as possible, but I do think that particular crime is kind of pretty.

Saturday, July 3

I saw this bug, an Ailanthus webworm moth, on the wall on my way back from the mailbox:



There's no story. I just saw it while I was walking and thought it looked interesting. I thought it was a beetle at first, but when I looked it up to see what kind it was I found out that the adults of the species hold their wings close to their bodies and pretend to be beetles.

Sunday, July 4

I celebrated Independence Day by making potatoes and Spam and cheese bites for a cookout at my friends Elizabeth and Ben's house. I described the potatoes briefly in the previous entry, and I think they were ok but not fantastic. The recipe called for a lot of olive oil, and it made the herbs I added not stick to the potatoes, which rendered them kind of bland. Everyone said they were good, but nobody took any home with them when they were gathering their leftovers, and actions speak louder than words.

I wasn't offended. I thought they weren't that great, either.

After dinner we rode halfway downtown to watch the fireworks:



and then I went home and crashed. Making mediocre potatoes takes a lot out of you.

Monday, July 5

My plan for today was to go to the University Gardens, since I haven't been in a while, and I invited Kristin since she has never been and wasn't sure where on campus they were. It was a nice, quiet day to walk around, but so hot outside since we went closer to lunchtime, and we didn't stay as long as I normally would because Kristin was sweaty and wanted to leave.

I worked on my black and white a little:





and mostly just walked around snapping things that caught my eye like I usually do:







I also spent about five minutes watching a large black butterfly feeding on some purple flowers, but I was kind of far away and it would not stop flapping its wings. These are the two best pictures I got out of the ones I tried, but I'm not happy with them:





Maybe I'll go next weekend and try again, if I'm not so busy.

My Patriotic Potatoes

We have a 4th of July cookout later, and I have just started my food prep:



I'm making roasted fingerling potatoes, and as you can see they are red, white, and purple. I'm going to pretend the purple ones are blue, and force all the guests at the cookout to pretend that they are blue as well. If I were really cynical, I'd say that forcing other people to believe what you believe is kind of what America is really all about given the passage of things like Proposition 8 in California or the Defense of Marriage Act, but I'm going to ignore my somewhat cynical nature for the day and embrace patriotism instead. After all, as much as America is about the tyranny of the majority, it's also about the protection of the minority and their freedoms, like my freedom to write something critical about America on my blog and then go make potatoes.

Enjoy my red, white, and (almost) blue potatoes, friends. I swear they're just a side dish, not a metaphor.

And also, thanks for the day off tomorrow, America. I have about two weeks worth of photos and adventures to sort through.

I hear they also have one in Pennsylvania

In comic books, Bizarro is a twisted version of Superman, an imperfect duplicate who wants to be the same but ends up being different. His planet, Bizarro World, is square while Earth is round, he causes disasters instead of saving people from them, the S on his shirt is backwards (but you usually can't see it because unlike the humble Superman Bizarro wears a homemade sign proclaiming himself to be #1), he is vulnerable to blue kryptonite instead of green, and so on.



Bizarro stories always annoyed me when I was little, but the Superman animated series gave me a better appreciation for him. In his send-off episode, the last time we see him on that show, he frees an animal from a zoo with the comment, "Why am you locked up? Me bet it am for something you not do," and I suddenly understood, and felt bad. At heart, Bizarro means well. He wants to be good. He just doesn't know how, and his essential nature fights against it. He wants to be Superman, but he'll always just be an imperfect duplicate.

I was thinking about Bizarro last week because I learned, from a commuter request form, that just down the road from me there is a Bizarro village of Philadelphia. I've mentioned before that my hometown is Philadelphia, NY, a small village that sits on Route 11, so I was surprised to learn that there's a Philadelphia, TN, and it also sits on Route 11. It's Philly, but not Philly! It's, as I said, Bizarro Philly, and I immediately wanted to go see it.

(Before anyone argues that our Philly is the Bizarro Philly, I'll point out that ours was founded first. Sorry, Bizarro Philly.)

I didn't know if there actually would be anything to see there, but Bryan offered to drive, so off we went on Saturday morning. It turns out that Bizarro Philly really is like our Philly, but different in small, odd ways.

1) We both have a closed gas station on Route 11. At home, ours is the Agway. In Bizarro Philly, I'm not sure what it is, because the sign is gone:



The whole building is gone, actually, but they left some lovely ruins behind:





2) Nothing important happened in our town, ever. Bizarro Philly, on the other hand, was the sight of the apparently famous Battle of Philadelphia:



According to the plaque next to the Civil War Trail sign:



the Battle of Philadelphia was fought a short distance away on Federal Hill:



It was the first Union defeat in East Tennessee, and allowed the Confederacy to capture a number of guns and supply wagons. Bizarro Philly is historically important, while our Philly has contributed nothing important to the historical record.

They sometimes claim to have invented cream cheese, but this is a lie.

3) Our town has a lot of churches. Bizarro Philly also has a lot of churches:





Is it just me, or does the "including you" come out sounding a lot less welcoming than it should?

The historical plaque was on the lawn of another church, and there was a non-photogenic Baptist church past the Presbyterian Church. We didn't stop because we were trying to find this church:



I have no idea what a cowboy church is. Bryan and I tried to follow the signs to find it, with a slight caution from me: "If we pull up and it looks like snake handlers or 'Children of the Corn', just drive away. I'll try to take a picture without getting out of the car," but we must have missed a turn or something because we just ended up doubled back to a street we'd already come down.

4) Regular Philly sometimes has graffiti problems:



So does Bizarro Philly:



5) Regular Philly is smack in the middle of dairy country. Bizarro Philly also has a dairy:



Their sign said that the cheese shop was open, so we went in, and there was so much cheese:



Case upon case of cheese, and the whole back of the store is glass windows into the cheese processing area, so you can see the presses and vats and drying areas. Even better, when I starting talking to the lady at the counter, whose husband owns the farm, I was explaining that I was from dairy country in upstate New York and she explained that her husband was, too! He's from Cortland, the town where I went to school for my undergrad. We started trading New York towns, and I went on to explain that the whole reason we were in Bizarro Philly was that my parents live in Philadelphia, New York.

"There's a Philadelphia in New York?" she exclaimed, eyes wide. "I never knew that!"

She probably thinks ours is the Bizarro Philly.