Complex Numbers

Revisited: "Stuck in Committee"

As has become my custom on Sundays here, I rolled the dice and came up with a past blog entry to give it another look. This one isn't that old, from April of 2023: "Stuck in Committee" 

At the time, I was on a random road trip. We all know I like to play with randomness, but I'm not sure if I've explained how I apply that to a road trip.

Well, simply put, there's a website (there might be an app for it, but I haven't bothered) that will generate a random point on a map within a user-defined radius from another point. The site returns lat/long coordinates, which get pasted into Maps. Then you figure out where the closest road is to that point and drive to it. If you're feeling adventurous, you can try hiking to the exact point, but around here, that's a good way to get shot.

There are, of course, other ways to do this. And you might have to account for a point ending up in an ocean or lake (which happened to me on the last leg of that particular trip). I expect some people find the idea silly; just pick a destination, already! Well, not me; I like the randomness. Most of the time.

From that earlier entry:

The town I was in was, if you care to look at it on a map, Wytheville, VA. I'd never spent any time in it before, but it's exactly what I expected from a small town in the mountains: two stoplights, 500 people, 600 churches, and a rustic nonfunctional clock on the courthouse.

Some of that might have been hyperbole.

And yet, the beers were named traditionally women's names. Like Rosie, Julia, Edith, etc. Which is fine; it's good to have a theme. But one thing disappointed me: there was no beer named Kate.

You see, I like to order tasting flights, which usually consist of 4-6 sampler-sized beers. The missed opportunity was that I could have had my Kate, and Edith too.

I will just pause while you absorb the greatness of that joke.

There's also the one about how you can't have your kayak and heat it, too.

Here, I found a couple of breweries in Chester, which is a city south of Richmond but north of Petersburg. No, it confuses me, too; as far as I'm concerned, all those cities and everything else in the vicinity is Richmond. There really ought to be a rule: unless there's a significant river (the James doesn't count) or a lot of trees and/or farmland in between, just fucking merge the cities.

I still feel strongly about that. It may be nice for the locals, for whatever reasons, but it's intensely confusing to outsiders (which may be the point).

I saw a wake of buzzards.

The entry goes into the difference between a wake and a committee, which depends on whether they're dining or not. And apparently, though I didn't note it then, if they're flying in formation, the collective noun is kettle.

Don't ask me; someone just made up what a group of something should be called, and people ran with it. I don't really know why. That's how we get a murder of crows or a clowder of cats. The best collective nouns make a kind of linguistic sense, though. Or at least maybe they rhyme or alliterate. Plus, it's boring to call everything a flock, pack, or herd.

Doesn't matter. I'm only pointing this out so the entry title makes sense.

And I don't know when I'll do another random road trip. Almost certainly not before this blog runs out of room.