A Cross Between R.L. Stein and James Fennimore Cooper

I sent my DOE off to the ultimate editors today for finally inspection. It was quite a task and is little bit nerve racking. It's like when a professor assigns you something that they wrote and you have to debate the merit of their argument in class. I am sending off my draft to the guy whose research I have been using to put together the DOE. I also have been emailing him on and off asking him where I can find certain sources and what not. And this is the guy who's going to evaluate my work. Tough.

So I spent another 4 hours doing my now daily image scanning and something about it seemed strangely ironic. Historians are always complaining that this generation might be lost to history because all our personal records are kept digitally, i.e. instead of letters we send emails and facebook messages and instead of diaries we blog and keep e-journals. So historians assume that all this will be lost and it will be extremely difficult to do anything resembling social history in the future. Here's what I see as ironic. My job is to take hard copies of photos and put them in a digital archive. Yeah, I get it. I'm saving them, and I really am. But in my 15th hour of scanning this struck me as a bit ironic and since I have so little to do here these types of Aha! moments end up in writing.

Oh blogging how I love and loathe thee.

In other news, I'm not longer going to Fairbanks for the solstice because the guy who was going to drive there has to be back Sunday afternoon and since its 6 hours away and the solstice party is Sunday we would miss all the real good stuff. So instead we are going to go to a Bluegrass festival in Cantwell, a small town near Denali National Park. Should be dope, but I'm bummed on not going to Fairbanks.

My final thought of the day: Head nods. I developed this theory with someone early on in college or maybe at the tail end of high school, but for the life of me I can't remember who that was. I have narrowed it down to a white male between the ages of 20-23.

But here's the theory. There are two kinds of head nods, the down nod and the up nod. The up nod is how you say "what's up" to your homies and or someone that you are informally familiar with. It's quick and can be exaggerated as needed. The down nod is for formal settings and can be used to acknowledge complete strangers as well if you are making strange and prolonged eye contact. It's like the tip of the cap type of head nod and can also be used in informal settings if you are so compelled. But the up nod on the other hand cannot be used in formal situations. You just can't do the up nod and say "what's up" to your boss and it would be weird if you did it too a complete stranger too. The up nod is only used if you know the person and they are a peer and preferrably a young person. It's a subtle difference but I think its a major and distinctive one.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Oh, and Jeff Smith, who "murdered" Soapy? It obviously wasn't Frank Reid becuase the exit wound didn't make sense for a duel and the bullet didn't match up. But who killed him, I can't find that information anywhere. Do you know? Does anyone? How? Also, I know I promised you another Soapy/Parlor Museum post. It's coming tomorrow evening, so look forward to it.