Back From Baton Rouge
I spent most of this week in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for a business trip. As I do for most of these I didn't get out much, except down the road for dinner at Applebee's and two very nice lunches with the people I was there to see. Some people I know make it point to go out and see the city at night whereever they are, but I prefer to stay in, watch a little TV and get to sleep early.

I hate being bored so when I travel I always have my MP3 player and Nintendo DS with me so that I'll always have something to keep me busy or distracted, and of course I make sure I have a book for the twenty minutes or so during which you can't use electronics on a plane. The book of the moment is Garrison Keilor's Lake Wobegon Days, which you'll be pleased to hear has not a single spaceship in it. The favoured game is Advance Wars DS, a military strategy game in which I always win because I'm using a character that I've built up so strongly that I can't lose...and I like it that way :)

During the flight on the way home I was on a plane that had a screen built into the back of every seat, and besides having television shows there were several games you could play. I went straight for the trivia game, which you play against other passengers. It was great :) I played 5 games of 20 questions each. I won two of them and came second in the other three. I've always been a "general knowledge" buff - some facts just seem to stick to my memory. When I was a boy I loved getting books with titles like "Big Book of Facts", and in later life I'd sit with box of Trivial Pursuit cards and just read them for fun.

So it'll be no surprise that I got onto a couple of quiz shows when I lived in Australia: Crossfire and Sale of the Century. I won Crossfire, taking home about ten thousand dollars of stuff, and won one night of Sale of the Century, only to lose right away on the following night. I hope my memory keeps working this way - it just feels good to have a raftload of useless facts at my disposal...I think it'd feel weird not to know that the WW II surrender was signed aboard the U.S battleship Missouri. That little factoid was worth five thousand bucks :) 

There's a 40% chance of the Space Shuttle being launched today so I'm going to drive up there and take a look-see. I found directions to Spaceview Park in Titusville and if my luck holds out I'll see a shuttle launch! I've always been a spaceflight fanboy, though the plan announced by President Bush to return to the moon and then proceed to Mars left me strangely cold. This man shows no interest in science during most of his waking hours and this really looked like a stunt. Plus NASA has had to cancel a lot of science missions to the outer planets. Still, I've been in Florida for nearly four years and still haven't even visited Cape Caneveral; very remiss of me! I'll come back with pictures if there's a launch.

Update: It launched three days later, on July 4th, while I was in Lousiana, but while trolling around the net I found these amazing pictures of a shuttle photographed from a U-2 spy plane flying high overhead.