I started my trivia journey in sixth grade, when some relative let me look through their Guinness Book of World Records.

I remember the same things everyone else does. Worlds fattest twins (riding on motorcycles). World’s longest fingernails. And the world’s most expensive signature, say it with me …

Button Gwinnett!

You know him, you love him, Button Gwinnett, signed the American Constitution and died young, leaving relatively few other signatures behind.

This week I learned that our boy Button is number two, and the winner should be this signature:

Morris Ggraham? Ma Grasshopper? No, that’s William Shakespeare.

You would think that W.S. would always have had the title of most expensive, but evidently none of his signatures have ever been traded. The U.K. government seems to have hoarded all of his signatures. So he isn’t even in the running.

So even though the winner should be Shakespeare, it isn’t. The current record-holder is Steve Jobs.

By Steve Jobs – Traced from http://www.hirdyman.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/7b0b8f6b3dletter.png.png, Public Domain, Link

Sold for about half a million dollars decades after I learned of Button Gwinnett. Even though I sense the iPad I’m typing on might not like this, Button still rules on in my heart.

This is what it was last week:

This is what it is now:

This is what it is supposed to be:

I just could not get the blue wash to stick. And I don’t know why every photo I take with this phone warps in one corner. Honestly, just that sky took 45 minutes, and now I have to soften it again.

Man, we were all hard up for content in 2008. We had Memes, and one meme from 2008 was a list of foods we had eaten, foods we hadn’t, foods we never heard of, and foods we’d never eat.

Here are things I have now eaten, formerly on the forgotten list of untried foods.

I knocked these off the list around St. Louis and Kansas City:
5. Crocodile (Some Mexican place in St. Charles) / 33. Salted lassi / 51. Prickly pear / 54. Paneer / 83. Pocky (Friend 4 brought it to Friend 2’s cookout) 85. Kobe beef (Some place on Laclede’s Landing)

I had to go further afield to try 59. Poutine (Toronto) and 73. Absinthe (New Orleans). And I only had to go as far as the Internet to get 90. Crillo Chocolate.

But what I find remarkable is how this list from almost 20 years ago predicted what I ate just this month in Chicago at the tasting menu at the three-Michelin-star restaurant:

50. Sea urchin / 53. Abalone / 62. Sweetbreads … and this is spooky … 84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.

I’m direct and honest. Not by choice, nor by nature. In my youth, all the boys complained I wasn’t open and honest enough. Then in my 30s I got one too many lesions and I found myself blurting my truth uncontrollably. I’m not mad about it anymore, because other people love it.

But, being honest makes me especially vulnerable to pathological liars … yet also especially sympathetic to them as well. How can I judge? They can’t help themselves any more than I can.

That’s why I am going to the theater to watch the new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, if that is her real name, and her imprisonment.

[watches movie]

Allow me to echo everyone when I say, Holy shit, that was not what I expected.

Also, I want a sequel with her parents; that’s what I want.

[additional thoughts]

They tell you to see it with an audience. Sadly, my Audience and I were not on the same page. My Audience was sitting next to their boyfriends. My Audience was uncomfortable with showering. My Audience did not get the masturbation reference; my guffaw echoed in the silence.

I felt some sympathy for Elizabeth Holmes: my Audience was not having it. I’m fairly certain the lad sitting next to me had lost his life savings to the fraud at 12, given how he was sighing and writhing.

You know, it’s been eight hours now and I just realized that perhaps I shouldn’t trust the editors.

I took to Reddit to see other takes on it and Reddit is WRONG; that shower scene is not gratuitous; that shower scene explains a lot.

The average financial settlement for the Coldwater Creek radiation contamination appears to take nine months to arrive. They give precedence to people who actively have cancer, naturally. Or they say they do. I think.

Really hard to believe that they did such a lousy job disposing of radioactive waste (put it in metal barrels and throw it into a creek) compared to how much thought they put into it now. Now they put it in salt mines that will slowly shift and encase the barrels in solid salt.

But, because those radioactive materials are so far underground and won’t decay for say 10,000 years, they plan for communicating with future humanoids: “Don’t dig here … and if you do, don’t open any barrels you find … and if you do, don’t chug what’s in the barrels you opened.”

I just found this delightful Wikipedia page on how much thought goes into warning future people that bad things are below:

Long-term nuclear waste Warning Messages

Suggestions summmarized:

• Written message that says “There is danger below here.” traslated into into French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Navajo. Those signs would be in a circle, and every generation would encircle the previous circle of signs with more signs with updated language.
• Skull and crossbones imagery
• A device that makes a spooky whistling sound
• Spikes. Lots of spikes.
• Gravel, like the kind on top of the Weldon Spring Site Disposal Cell (where there is also a written sign with a typo warning of “Inclimate” weather; so much for bullet one above.)
• Cats bred to change color the closer they are to radiation, publicized with “a song, called 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty) … designed to be ‘so catchy and annoying that it might be handed down from generation to generation over a span of 10,000 years’^[18]