Sumiki

Auction over, topic closed!

Thanks! The topic in question has been posted here! Glad it was sorted out!

Every three to five years, on average, the incumbent Doctor regenerates, and because the BBC doesn't want to keep things a surprise until the actual regeneration episodes—which seem to occur exclusively on Christmases, for some heretofore unacknowledged reason—we, as fans, are left with knowing who's next in line without the benefit of seeing their Doctor's performance in an actual episode. I became a fan of the show during the Tenth Doctor's run, and I remember the absolute uproar that accompanied Matt Smith's casting announcement. The promotional pictures looked like a glib tween acting cool in front of a poster. Leaked audio sounded absolutely miserable (and it was from the equally miserable "Victory of the Daleks," the worst entry of Series 5). People voiced legitimate concerns over Smith's ability to portray a venerated character because he hadn't had any major roles before then; people simply did not know him. On top of all this, he was the youngest Doctor since Peter Davison, whose lapel celery was more memorable than his actual character traits. Smith became a great Doctor, with a phenomenal ability to display great warmth, humor, and wonder, all while being an old man in a young man's body. His performance as the Eleventh Doctor was the only redeeming feature of much of Series 7. His performance survived flanderization in a way that Tennant's never could. When Peter Capaldi was announced as the Twelfth Doctor, people actually knew him from somewhere, which mitigated the expected uproar. Here was an avowed Doctor Who fan whose casting was only a shock to those who knew him as a foul-mouthed political operative in one of his more (in)famous roles. An older Doctor after two straight younger actors was certainly a welcome change to the show's dynamic, and indeed it allowed for a more world-weary Doctor to emerge. My concerns with how the show unfolded with Capaldi as the lead has infinitely more to do with the tropes of the Steven Moffat era. Twelve is not my favorite Doctor, but has done a fine job with what he was given. I have fallen pray to the judgement of a Doctor based solely on the criterion of name, and I have learned my lesson from doing so, in part because it's vastly unfair to the actor and the show to assume the quality of a performance based on not having seen so much as a single line of dialogue. The Steven Moffat era has also taught me, in a big way, that the quality of a Doctor has much more to do with the quality of the episodes they are given. Whatever my thoughts on a new Doctor might be, I have learned to withhold all judgement until a few full episodes into their run. All of which brings us to Jodie Whittaker. The backlash has been enormous, and most comment sections are plagued with vile insults towards Whittaker being a female. Some have even wished her death before filming begins, all because she auditioned for the part and was chosen by an incoming showrunner who has a whole lot more riding on this than her. Chris Chibnall wants this whole thing to go well, and I, for one, am extraordinarily pleased with the fact that Moffat is leaving (albeit three and a half seasons too late in my book). Showrunners, in my view, should change with the Doctors they cast for the sake of fresh ideas, if the standard three seasons of service holds up for future incarnations. On the other hand, I steadfastly refuse to believe the notion that all who criticize a casting decision are doing so for reasons of deep and abiding prejudice. The concerns of those who do not want change are amplified by the concern that this is a big change—and it is! Those whose only problem stems from the belief that "the Doctor is a man" are ... well, frankly, I'm not sure they've even been watching the same show, and I don't want to be the ones to tell them that they're watching House M.D. reruns. In this onslaught of misogynistic stupidity, the few of the grammatically coherent grievances seemed to get at a deeper point of commonality: the concern that a show they care about was about to be ruined by casting choices driven by a need for diversity and inclusivity at the expense of talent, evidence of a trend whose only logical end point is in mediocrity and appeasement. Those who speak out against political correctness or the excesses of so-called social justice warriors are not a monolithically evil group. I and others may disagree with much of what they point out, but they and their ideas must not be countered with a backhanded dismissal of their grievances and subsequent jokes at their expense. Such dismissal has only led to larger divisions in discourse. Discussion, and the ability to connect with and understand and even—gasp—get along with those who do not abide by your positions—in anything, cultural or otherwise—is a lost art. There is diversity of opinion amongst those I know, and though I may not count them friends, I am enriched as a human being for imagining them complexly and understanding the background of their positions. In their grievances, evidence of an encroaching ultra-feminist agenda in media is rampant and nigh-unstoppable in an attempt to rack up social-justice brownie points at the expense of quality entertainment. Yet the entertainment industry knows only dollars; "diversity" is dangerously approaching meaningless-buzzword status if we don't seriously examine the ins and outs, the hows and whats, and the ups and downs of what that word means to those who toss it around like meatballs at a food fight. A frank conversation on what diversity is and what diversity may be expected is, I'm afraid, not something that's going to happen; realism is impossible to inject in the polarized state of online discourse. Thus, detractors of Whittaker will say that her role must be the result of a desire to placate an agenda, but said agenda has much less power over the industry than is warranted by evidence. Without any performance of the 13th Doctor in action until Christmas, hot takes must therefore rely on the comparison of Doctor Who to other media—which, as we shall see, is an endeavor fraught with falsehood. The Ghostbusters reboot is pointed to. It was a well-intentioned film starring some of the funniest women in America, but its middling performance at the box office has to do with more than a cadre of die-hard nerds who hated the leads for their gender. It didn't do great at the box office, but it wasn't a flop either; any reboot of an iconic franchise was going to have a hard time getting off the ground. Its problem was that it wasn't the original, and remakes and reboots will always have such a specter—a point of departure that continues as a point of comparison. Were there sexists who hated Ghostbusters for their own smarmy and thoroughly illegitimate reasons? Absolutely. To say otherwise is to deny the filth of comment sections the Web over, but to say that this is the only reason that there's no new Ghostbusters II is to deny the inherent complexity of the situation. Ghostbusters does not equate to Doctor Who, and it goes beyond their vastly different media. Doctor Who is the kind of cultural institution that Ghostbusters could only dream of being, with a history far longer and a canon mythology far vaster. Doctor Who prides itself on its built-in ability to stay relevant, while Dan Akyroyd exploding in a flash of light to reveal Kate McKinnon isn't something that fits or works in any stretch, although would be hilariously funny if they'd pulled it on SNL. Ghostbusters as a film felt as forced to me as, say, the Beauty and the Beast remake; in both instances, I bemoaned the lack of Hollywood originality before continuing to go about my day. James Bond is often mentioned. Those concerned over the infiltration of women into male roles are very concerned that the ultimate masculine hero in Bond has a coterie of devotees who wish to see a woman take over when Daniel Craig decides to hang up the iconic tuxedo. Such a choice would fundamentally change the nature of the Bond franchise, a phrase upon which supporters and detractors of the idea would agree, though rooted as they are in opposing motivations. To them, then, a Charlize Theron Bond is as blasphemous as a Jodie Whittaker Doctor. Again, this is an overly simplistic argument. A female Bond won't solve the history of misogyny in Bond's actions over the years; that is something that must be confronted head-on with a male lead and is something I want to have happen in the next film (likely to be Craig's last). In addition, the continuous narrative as pursued in the Craig era means that the continuity of the series—something glossed over from Connery to Brosnan—is something that's probably going to be dealt with by making "James Bond" a code word ... but then Skyfall makes no sense. But I digress. That issue is worthy of exploration if and when it comes to pass. (Until then, I'm squarely in the Idris Elba corner.) Bond is an institution in British culture of a different nature than ​Doctor Who, though they both feature a face-changing main character. But therein lies the difference; Doctor Who has the built-in mechanism to handle massive whopping changes and emerge stronger for it. No other show has that narrative longevity; not even The Simpsons deals with it because of their floating timeline. Timothy Dalton's Bond never met Roger Moore's Bond, highlighting the issues inherent with a long-running series built on the real world and the plausible situations therein (Moonraker notwithstanding). The fantastical aspects of Doctor Who afford it the ability to do anything, and the best episodes are built on that wonderment and not quite knowing what's going to happen week to week. Bond runs on formula, whereas Who dies if formulaic. The Doctor's claim to fame is the ability to solve problems with brains and not brawn, and in many cases shunning physical violence except where necessary. Masculine physicality—an aspect in Bond—plays absolutely no role for the Doctor. "Doctor" is an agender title; "James" is a male name. The franchises are insufficiently similar for comparisons to make sense. As far as the casting being against the nature of Doctor Who itself, this also is absurd. Women equal in intelligence and savvy to the Doctor have long been a staple of the show, from his granddaughter Susan to Time Ladies Romana and the Rani to his artificial daughter Jenny from "The Doctor's Daughter" to the DoctorDonna of "Journey's End" to the entire River Song arc ... well, point made. The last-ditch claim underlying this is that it is coming out of the blue; they're only caving to fans who want to see a female Doctor for the sake of there being a female Doctor, without regard or concern for series quality. This is steadfastly refuted by the casting of a great and established actress who can make the role hers; whether or not she will remains to be seen in 2018. But this particular change has been hinted at since the very beginning of Smith's run, expressly confirmed as normal Time Lord biology in "The Doctor's Wife" (probably my favorite episode of 11's run), confirmed on-screen when Missy faced off against 12, then actually literally shown as an on-screen regeneration when it wasn't actually necessary for the plot in the Series 9 finale, which was also coupled with a change of race. They'd built it up that I would have been surprised if they didn't pick a woman. It's not out of the blue because it is something that the show has hinted at and introduced in stages, precisely to alleviate the blowback and mitigate the claim that such casting is made under false pretense. Any amount of concern about the "sudden" nature of this news, or any concern whatsoever about a purported "caving to feminist ideology," is absurd on every conceivable level and then probably a few inconceivable ones there beyond. Coming through loud and clear from the writer's desks is that the Time Lords are still a bunch of wild and wacky aliens, and even then, changing genders 50/50 throughout a single lifetime is considered unusual, albeit not abnormal. Through wary as always of passing premature judgement, I am fully expecting to be very excited for 2018 after the Christmas special. It's just a shame that there will be others who won't.

Most of the middle-of-the-season stories are fairly consistent from season to season (aside from absolutely abysmal entries like as Kill the Moon). The problem is that I'm not sure Moffat has written a good premiere or finale since The Big Bang, and since the series bookends determine the arc of that season, a terrible idea can infect the whole shebang. That's my main issue with series 9, actually—the whole "hybrid" thing went beyond "hard to follow" territory into "aggressively nonsensical" land. I hope that Chibnall puts an end to the abhorrent practice of out-of-character actions driving drawn-out tell-don't-show plot-hole-besotted action figure fantasies that put the Doctor's life or the human race or the whole universe or all of Time Itself™ in jeopardy twice a series.

The fact that Chibnall is in charge instead of Moffat was infinitely more relieving than any on-screen casting decision. As we've learned from Capaldi's tenure, brilliant actors can be squandered if the plots suck. Don't get me wrong, I love that they got an actress who can really nail the role, but the scripts better do her justice.

I always had this deep abiding feeling that Photobucket was sketchy. NOW WE ALL KNOW.

> mfw I guzzle half a bottle of maple syrup for Canada's birthday

Please don't post in topics that have been inactive for over sixty days.

Topic closed upon request of the starter.

Please don't post in topics that have been inactive for over 60 days—or, in this case, two and a half years.

I am such a sucker for #1 you have no idea

how many farm animals per day can you chuck into a black hole before you begin hearing their anguished cries in your sleeping hours

1) Having to run half a mile up an Interstate in Washington State 2) Having a tour van run out of gas on the way back from the Arctic Circle (To be fair, neither was particularly funny in the moment.)

-----There were several ways to get back to North Carolina from the Lexington area, but we had several provisions for a successful return. The fastest route by time would have taken us through the mountains of West Virginia, which we had sworn off on the way up and were not about to risk on the trip's final day. Instead, we opted for a scenic drive—by Kentucky standards, which means lots and lots of trees and mountains—through Appalachia, which saved miles but sacrificed a bit of time. -----The scenery was about what we'd expect, what with the greenery and mountains and all. We've felt like we're basically in our backyard since we got to Spokane, and when this close, we felt the extra push. As such, we got up at a whopping 6:00 and were able to leave around 8:00. -----We got gas in a small town before we got to the larger peaks of the Appalachians, and it was one of those places where McDonald's was probably in the "fine dining" category. There was effectively nothing to do on the journey until we got to Pikeville, near the border, where there were several signs about the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud. Stopping for such things is more suited for the beginnings of journeys than their ends, and so we pressed on. -----As much as we wanted to get home as early as we could, we needed lunch, and it was here than our Jimmy John's habit caught up to us. There was none in Abingdon, but according to a random Facebook page, there was one in Marion—purported birthplace of Mountain Dew—just a bit further up the road. The process of navigating to it, however, took us straight up into a hospital complex with no through traffic. My dad began laughing maniacally while I got us to Arby's instead, where we each got some roast beef sandwiches. -----The worst traffic was from Marion to Wytheville down into North Carolina via Fancy Gap. The road itself was fine, but truckers jockeying and weaving made for some hair-raising situations that evolved in front of us. Once into North Carolina, we went around Pilot Mountain and made it safely home at a little past 3:30, where we unpacked while marveling at the amount of stuff we jammed into the car. -----Total mileage on vehicle: 10,151.9 Miles -----Total mileage overall: Unknown (approx. 12,000?) -----# of States, Provinces, & Territories: 20 -----# of Pennants Collected: 5 -----Pairs of Chicken Socks Purchased: 1 -----# of Breakdowns: 0 -----# of Culver's Eaten At: Too Many -----Tomorrow: Costco

-----Over the past several days, our hotel breakfasts have been slipping from the upward side of mediocrity down towards the barely edible. After a couple of pancakes that hardly deserved the name—and how on Earth do you mess up a pancake?—we headed out of Champaign towards the Indiana border. We picked up much traffic en route to Indianapolis, and instead of skirting around it, we went directly into its heart to Victory Field, home of the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians. -----But what was to become the enduring theme of our time in Indiana is that you can't drink the water. Something—I know not what—happened to the water supply in the entire region. A sign was posted on rest areas saying that water should be boiled for five minutes before using, and that same rest area featured a man mumbling to himself in one of the stalls. -----We entered Indianapolis on the bad side of town, and made it around heavily tilted buses to the downtown complex that includes Lucas Oil Stadium—home of the Indianapolis Colts—as well as Victory Field, which we were after. Being Saturday, they were using the stadium for the high school championship tournament, and it had a decent-sized crowd. We explained our inexplicable quest to the folks letting people in, and they allowed my dad to idle the car outside while my mom and I ran in to get a pennant. -----They had no pennant, but they were nice about it and we got a hat instead. They're between styles of pennant and as of yet have not received their new shipment, but since we've been there—finally, after three times in the immediate area—we'll allow ourselves the luxury of ordering one. -----If there is a more heinous and hideous stretch of Interstate in the country than the one between Indianapolis and Louisville, I've yet to witness it. Trucks would seemingly make a game of passing each other, nearly swiping oblivious and speeding cars off the road and nearly tipping over themselves. Not a single highway patrol car was so much as parked on the side of the road to enforce the rules and customs associated with a pleasant highway experience. On top of all this, the road surface itself was so pockmarked that I longed for the Klondike Highway for the second time in as many days. -----We exited the highway in Columbus in pursuit of our daily Jimmy John's lunch, but it was much too far off of the highway. The built-up area featured a menagerie of restaurants and gas stations, so we pulled into a Culver's only to realize that not only was it closed, but every other eating establishment was as well. In the door was pasted a sign saying that they were closed due to the water contamination. Gas was the only thing we could get before we got back on the infernal road south. -----There was a toll bridge across the Ohio River to Louisville, but the toll never materialized. Instead, the nastiness of the Indiana road was now the nastiness of the Kentucky road, and the worst offenders were those who were hauling things that they ought not to have been and/or had University of Kentucky paraphernalia on their bumpers or back windshields. There was something decidedly unpleasant about having to drive through it, but the sheer amount of traffic had cleared out significantly. -----We got off in the suburbs of Lexington for a Culver's dinner, as it is the last time we'll eat their cheese curds and burgers and pot roast sandwiches for a long while. It wasn't crammed with the screaming kids we'd come to expect, and it was not long before we were working our way through the pastoral Kentucky countryside, past horse farms and rolling pastures, to the suburb of Winchester, where our hotel's miserable exterior belies one of the most updated and fancy interiors we've been at. (They even have a small spread of hors d'oeuvres near the front desk.) -----Tomorrow: we get home.

-----There were no clouds when we left West Des Moines, and post-mediocre waffles, we set out for downtown. The fastest route was through the city, and along the route lay the stadium of the Iowa Cubs, Chicago's Triple-A affiliate. With no game on the docket, we waltzed past the silent front desk people and straight into the team store, where there was no one there. My dad's timid "hellos" would have echoed eerily had the store been larger. -----Most of what the Iowa Cubs sell is just regular Cubs merchandise with "Iowa" in script stuffed in somewhere nearby. It's a half-cooked aesthetic and prevents the team from having its own identity. Their pennant was in this vein—though cheaper than most are—and we were checked out by a college intern who looked half-asleep, which added to the dreariness of her already pancake-flat personality. I would usually diagnose an especially rowdy party on the prior night, but she seemed the type for whom a slightly different shade of mayonnaise would provoke a faint. -----Pennant in tow, we were back on the road, and it wasn't too much longer that we got out of Des Moines. The downtown area was cute—in as far as downtown areas are concerned, as I view most cities as basically the same sort of thing anyway—but we had the rest of Iowa and most of Illinois to go. Our next stop was the college town of Iowa City, whose signage heavily implies that it used to be the state capital. Being a college town, there was no Jimmy John's shortage. I don't want to abandon forever the idea of going to local places, but sticking to an eating schedule has really helped us make tracks back across the country. -----Not far from Iowa City is West Branch, best known for being the birthplace of Herbert Hoover. History tends to make his presidency out as ineffective at best and malicious at worst and his legacy is relegated to being amongst the five or ten worst to ever hold office. He was known as the Great Humanitarian for his civilian work in bringing large-scale food relief to Europeans during World War I, putting in long days to help them through the crisis. When the Great Depression hit on his watch, he turned back to the way his family would weather the periodic recession or depression, and assumed that wealth would be infused into the economy much as he had helped in Europe. By the time things got worse, he was too unpopular—and too much of a lame duck—to get anything done. -----Hoover rehabilitated himself in the public eye until his death in 1964, mostly by temporal distance from the Depression era. He had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and possessed an optimistic ideology about the elimination of poverty. Yet his work in the public eye went well beyond the public perception of his ineptitude, even in the Depression, when he sought to bolster the financial infrastructure in subtle ways and at arm's length. -----His birthplace, which is integrated into the cute and historic West Branch, is next to his Presidential Library and Museum. We hadn't the time to visit that part of things, but we spoke for a long while with a park ranger stationed outside Hoover's reconstructed two-room boyhood home, where we picked his brain about Hoover's reasons for being ineffective despite being the "Great Humanitarian." In West Branch, they're all fans of a usually disliked figure, so I get the sense that they enjoy getting to dig into the details of his life. -----About a half-hour's drive from West Branch is the Quad Cities area, and we were after a pennant from the Quad Cities River Bandits, whose historically located stadium—literally right across the train tracks, and with a view of the Mississippi River and Illinois beyond—was ranked the best in the Minor Leagues by USA Today. Its size and amenities made me guess at least Double-A, but they were in fact Single-A. The three people with whom we shared interaction had the kinds of monotone voices that could put inanimate objects to sleep, and I realized then that they weren't bored or upset with us ... it was—unfortunately—just the way they talked. -----The ticket office guy sent us inside, where the secretary gave a call to someone else, who came down the steps and shuttled us up the elevator to the team store on the main concourse. Their hats were quite cool and we got one for that collection as well as our requisite pennant. Their store even had an enormous bobblehead of their mascot, who cheers on a team that the man who checked us out called "somewhat competitive." They even had a lounge—well, an upscale bar—on the concourse behind home plate, where motion-filled quasi-abstract paintings of River Bandits players adorned the brick walls. -----Upon returning to our car, I'm sure those involved with the process of getting us in to get our pennant were stunned—for several completely silent hours, no doubt—about the fact that three people came in with actual inflections in their voices. (Perish the thought!) -----We went over a rather rickety-looking bridge—which we were told was erected before American involvement in World War II—and went into Illinois. We ended up going through three of the Quad Cities. Illinois, though it may be about to default on its debt, still has room for expansive road construction segments all over I-74, and there were seemingly more of those infernal things than actual road—which was itself in bad shape. I've seen better Yukon roads, and I shouldn't have to say that. -----After skirting around Peoria, we got gas in the town of Carlock, which is quite a funny name for a place to get gas. It wasn't long thereafter that we reached the Champaign-Urbana area, where we got the scenic tour of about two miles through the heart of downtown. I can't figure the place out, as derelict buildings and questionable characters are perhaps only a few hundred feet from extremely affluent sections of uppity restaurants and outdoor concerts. The whole place, as far as I've seen, is a patchwork city. -----We drove through the local Culver's. We had every intention of getting out and going inside, but several large families were already in there and we could see writhing masses of children cooped up inside. What really sealed the deal against going inside was a girl who let out a blood-curdling scream at us while being driven by, apparently just for kicks. Crazed Champaigners were not the kinds of Champaigners with which we wanted to interact. -----Tomorrow: we finally get that pesky Indianapolis pennant en route to Lexington, Kentucky.

Please don't post in topics that have been inactive for over sixty days. Topic attached to ill-fated jaywalker.

-----We left Mitchell at 10:00 and hit I-90 towards Sioux Falls. For the first time since the day we left Olympia, we spent time off of that particular road, as we merged onto I-29 southbound towards Sioux City. But before Sioux City, we got off on ND-50 towards Vermillion, home of the National Music Museum. Like many of the great museums, it's one that withstands repeated visits and elicits the same stupefied fascination each time, even if a great many of their exhibits stay identical. Their Javanese Gamelan—one of the most complete outside Indonesia—had been brought down to the main floor for a recent performance by the local ensemble, and their front desk area was altered, but other than that it remained exactly as expected (and previously described in GART4: VI – "Clarinet on the Cob"). -----My one complaint about the NMM is that, while the girl at the front desk was very pleasant, their Web site—only recently refurbished from the completely inadequate husk of one that they'd had theretofore—is filled with some of the most execrable pretentiousness this side of a tattooed hipster who passes off pieces of gravel as deep artistic expression. NMM policies prohibit returning e-mails of any kind to anyone who doesn't give them at least $100 per annum. Their communications director was, I have reason to believe, the leader of a tour group of entirely out-of-control kids who, despite being of small number, more than made up for it in complete obnoxiousness and loudly voiced desires for two demonstrations of an equally loud nickelodeon-style harmonium, which they got. -----Road construction marred the South Dakota-Iowa border, and it was the very road construction that, in 2015, gave us the pesky windshield crack that eventually forced us home from southern Utah in the course of three days. They've not made a lick of progress in as far as I can tell, but we got through it unscathed all the same. (It continues to bother me, however, that North Sioux City is the southernmost point in South Dakota.) -----We came down the western side of Iowa and split off before the Omaha metropolitan area—which we could see in the distance—and then headed halfway across the state to Des Moines. It's stereotypically Iowan countryside, with farmlands of corn and occasional cattle going up and down rolling hills as far as the eye could see. Various two-story houses—not skimpy on size—were placed under the shade of small groves of trees. It's one of those drives where the most exciting thing about it are some of the signs for the minor attractions situated a county away, such as John Wayne's birthplace. (We found the occasional deer sightings much more interesting.) -----We navigated through the residential area of West Des Moines to our hotel. Upon checking in, my dad almost immediately asked the girl at the front desk how close the nearest Culver's was, and she seemed a little concerned for his Butterburger® craving until we told her of our recent whereabouts and the fact that we can't get them at home. -----It was Culver's indeed, though to get out we had the issue of construction, which necessitated ... yes, you probably guessed it—a gravel break. (And in true gravel break fashion, we had to pass someone on its 1.5 lanes.) It was pleasant to be in an establishment where there, for once, weren't any rowdy kids under the watch of ineffectual parents. Most patrons seemed to be at the drive-through, and there seemed to be quite a few of them—though we looked out beyond them into the unusual sunset colors against the storm clouds of the south. They seemed to be further south and moving due east, but we didn't want to take any chances where hail two inches in diameter may be involved—and, sure enough, they soon called for such hail in Des Moines. Fortunately for us, the rest of the patrons of this hotel had not had the bright idea of moving their respective cars to shelter under the overhang of the adjoining—and currently unoccupied—convention center. -----We flipped the TV on, and it took us a while to locate the local channels. When we did, we soon learned that hail of such diameter—baseball-sized now, they warned—was not really much of a concern to them. If anything, the anchors treated the subject with detached fascination as opposed to the programming-preempting red alerts that such weather would warrant in North Carolina. Not even a ticker on the bottomline kept us informed during the commercial breaks. We waited for the hail to come, and the worst-looking cell passed with much lightning and much wind, but not a stone of hail. -----My dad, when realigning the car underneath its protective awning, let another car park behind, who turned out to be one with an Alaskan plate. As it turns out, the man who drove it was from Fairbanks and was familiar with the barbecue at Big Daddy's. He was shocked to find out that we drove the Alaska and Top of the World Highways with no punctured tires, no dings in the paint, and no cracks in the windshield. -----Tomorrow: across the rest of Iowa to Champaign, Illinois—unless, of course, we catch up with the slowly moving storm.

Honestly the only criticism I have of the NMM is that they—and this is true—don't respond to your e-mails unless you're a patron who gives them at least $100 per annum.

-----Just like the past few days, it was I-90 all the way. It was the last of the Rocky Mountain foothills, as South Dakota brings with it the prospect of true plains where the speed limit of 80 almost seems low once you get used to going such a speed. We know that Wyoming can be a pleasant state, though it wasn't much so this time—but the "fajitas" weren't upsetting us. -----We were to South Dakota pretty much before we knew it, and within two hours of our 10:00 departure had made it to Rapid City, where we got our requisite Jimmy John's and prepared for the road to Mitchell. The best way to cross the plains, as far as I'm concerned, remains I-90 in South Dakota, where the road is good, the wind is steady enough to be acclimated to, and there is just enough traffic to keep the driver focused. Unlike Wyoming—a state which seems to delight in closing lanes haphazardly and with no discernible reason—South Dakota's road work is actually obviously useful and necessary. -----I don't know if it's because South Dakota's economy greatly depends on tourism—from the interminable signs for Wall Drug to the tourist traps of the Corn Palace, 1880 Town, the Borglum Story, and so on—or what, but it's always been a nice state to visit, even if its population centers are essentially on opposite sides. There's enough blankness in the middle to give you a sense of the vastness of the heartland, but still it pales when set against the true desolation of points further north. -----After so much cold weather throughout our journey, we've finally caught up to summer. It was 45º just the other day, and the high today was a whopping 88º. But 88 isn't all that bad, for it is a dry heat—and the wind, which was steady throughout, was rushing in our direction, which was better for our gas mileage than driving against the wind, as we did yesterday. -----The road simply gets gradually flatter and flatter as you move east, with only the occasional pronghorn or cattle sighting to break things up. Geologically, we saw Devil's Tower in the distance before we exited Wyoming, and saw snippets of the Badlands as we went north of them. But as we'd been there twice and already had a six-hour day—not including the loss of an hour as we went into Central Time—any revisitation would have to wait until a future trip. -----We were last in Mitchell two years ago, and it seems to have grown in that time, with a fancy new hospital complex and an even bigger Cabela's. After yesterday's fiasco, we were wary of returning to the steakhouse at which we dined two years ago. Instead, we realized that we were now back in the land of Culver's, and ate there instead. It was as good a burger as we'd come to expect and would have been even better had the restaurant not been overrun by a cadre of small and uncontrolled kids under the lackadaisical jurisdiction of a clearly incompetent mom. -----Tomorrow: we return to the National Music Museum in Vermillion before heading to Des Moines.

-----We've put around three thousand miles on the vehicle since its last oil change/tire rotation in Anchorage, and the intervening three thousand include the Tok Cut-Off, the Top of the World Highway, and the vicious hills and traffic in the state of Washington. We wouldn't be able to get back home without a last stop at a dealership, and luckily, one was about a mile from where we stayed in Bozeman. My dad returned about forty-five minutes after leaving and reported that somehow, the brakes were in exactly the same condition as they were in Anchorage, i.e. nearly completely intact. The tires, having been worn down through our travels, have reached their half-life, meaning that we'll be able to get home on them with no problem and tens of thousands of miles left after that. -----Interstate 90 was again our route, and it was again surprising how familiar we were with it. Rain was again our companion for the first half of the journey, east to Billings before dropping south into Wyoming, but it stopped prior to our lunch in Sheridan at the Jimmy John's at which we ate last time. The gravel breaks came back again, this time as road work diverted traffic up and over an exit. We saw some pronghorn, but little in the way of other wildlife. Transitioning from the Rockies to the plains isn't a sudden flattening-out, but rather the rolling and meandering hills which we saw much of today. -----Past Sheridan lay Buffalo, and past Buffalo lay over sixty miles of nothing. When you look on a map, there isn't a single settlement between Buffalo and Gillette. This was where 80 MPH on the roads actually made some sense—or it would have, if it weren't for the wind which gusted up to 40 MPH. The few exits were local ranch access routes where the posted speed limit was a rip-roaring 10. But it took less than an hour to make the trip and we made it to Gillette. The hotel, as we'd figured from our reservation snafu, is not well-run, but their rooms are new and clean ... even if we had to fix the clock so it'd be the right time. -----Two years ago, we stayed here in Gillette and ate at a Mexican restaurant called Los Compadres. We remembered great salsa, huge portions, and tasty food, and this time we only got the first two. The fajitas had gristly meat steeped in standing oil, watery refried beans, barely-cooked tortillas, and utterly tasteless everything else. It's still the #1-ranked place in all of Gillette, which means that they either had an off night or have gone way downhill. It just was, and for their quasi-effort at a flavorful meal, I shudder to think of the product of whatever's ranked second to them. -----(Side note: when we started on this journey, we fully expected our worst meals to be on the Alaska Highway for its captured audience, but as it turns out, our worst experiences by far have been our return journey, from the putridity of Haines to the "pizza" of Forks to whatever this was. There's a reason we're sticking to Jimmy John's a lot!) -----Tomorrow: a return to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.

Congratulations!

how does this affect the imminent presidency of Air Bud

-----From Spokane, it was all I-90 today. We crossed the state line, through the treacherously mountainous fifty-odd miles of the Idaho panhandle and then downhill on precipitous curves into Montana. We were hit with our first heat wave of the trip, as the high was 80º as we went through the mountain passes. After the Rocky Mountains conclude, it'll be some smooth sailing ... but getting through them proved more difficult than initially imagined. -----The first city of much size in Montana along the eastbound I-90 corridor is Missoula. As we retraced our route from the first trip, it was surprising what we remembered of Missoula, although what's new is a road construction section along a roundabout in town that featured—of all things—loose gravel. We never saw loose gravel before this trip and, post-Alaska Highway, it's just following us for the express purpose of taunting us. If our driveway has mysteriously turned to gravel when we get back, I'll really know something's up. -----We've had more than our fair share of heavy meals on this trip, and on the way back we have a great interest in eating light, so we had a Jimmy John's downtown. On the way back out, we got gas, and from our vantage point we caught a glimpse of a bearded man plucking away on a small bright red ukulele, and around him was a dog and a creature who appeared for all the world to be a bear. It had to have been a dog, but it looked exactly like a bear cub. Missoula's one of those weird and unusual places where you'd find stuff like that. -----As we drove along, we recalled our adventures on the same road five years prior, when we'd been hit with a thunderstorm of epic proportions and had to duck into the very Bozeman hotel from which I am writing this to check the weather, being entirely free of smartphone tyranny at the time. This time, we were armed with the foreknowledge of the route ... and the fact that there was, once again, a storm on the horizon. My mom kept us updated from her backseat post as we inched further to the storm, and spotted a sole bald eagle out the window as we did. -----Montana's roads are neither better nor worse than the roads of the states that surround it, but they effectively have no speed limit, because for most of the day, it was set at 80. Mountain roads, curves, and the occasional chipsealed section made for some hairy driving in spots. They do care about the speed limit in their unnecessarily long road construction sections, where—moments after a sign reaffirming 80—it drops to 35. What's worse is that they expect you to actually pull it off, which leads me to wonder how quickly dealership maintenance departments go through brakes. (You can't go 80 up the hills because it'd bust your engine, you can't go 80 down because you'd go straight off the cliff, and you can't go 80 around a curve because the guardrails would shred you up before you could say the words "antilock brake system.") -----The rain dropped slowly, but the temperature plummeted quickly, going down to a low of 47º. The rain came down in torrential sheets, and lightning struck the mountaintops around. On several occasions, we were certain that a enormous thunderclap was imminent due to the apparent proximity of the strike, but there was barely a sound. It was in this rain that we went through Butte and went over the last section of treacherous mountainousness: the Continental Divide. We passed over as quickly as was safe because we didn't want to get toasted by an errant bolt from the gray, but all the same, there were small rivers that appeared to be flowing over the road. Hydroplaning never happened, but appeared imminent throughout. -----Once past Butte and towards Bozeman, the temperature warmed again, reaching into the 50s, as the northbound storm broke up. Things still looked dark and dreary, so once we were safely at our hotel, we set out for dinner ... at a nearby Jimmy John's. I wouldn't be surprised if the steaks from the Rusty Moose in Spokane constitute our last heavier meal. -----My dad then next wanted to modify tomorrow night's reservation in Gillette so as to get an entirely free room instead of a heavily discounted one. In order to do so, he had to create a second reservation and then cancel the first. When he went to cancel the first one, it was ever so slightly past the cancelation deadline. Usually this isn't a problem, as we've done it before with no issues at all, but to do so, he had to call the hotel ... which is where things got real fun. -----The girl at the front desk immediately put us on hold, and then for five minutes flirted with another customer—as we could hear the whooooooole thing—and only picked up the phone when she remembered that she'd put it down. She said that, despite what the web site said, she had no authority to do cancelations, which had to be done through the main hotline. My dad got on the phone to the main hotline and was given the severest of run-arounds before getting to some guy who told him that there was no way the policy would allow a late cancelation unless we had the name of the girl in Gillette. My mom called the Gillette people on her phone, and—as my dad was conducting the other conversation from my phone, we stuck the two phones face-to-face so she could say "I give the approval for the cancelation," which was all that was necessary in the first place. -----The Jimmy John's was not satisfying, so we went to the hotel restaurant for an appetizer, which were bacon gorgonzola fries. The sole waitress had no other patrons and we had a good time asking her random questions about Montana. Dessert was huckleberry ice cream, and it was extremely good, almost like a blueberry crossed with a strawberry. -----On the way back to the room, we explained the Gillette run-around to the guy at the front desk, and he was flabbergasted that any hotel would have such unusual policies regarding cancelation, especially considering that we were still staying at the same property and effectively just altering the payment. Whoever was at the front desk in Gillette was clearly not following procedures, and heaven help her if there's the slightest of problems when we get there. -----Tomorrow: Gillette.

Our desire for a complete collection of minor-league pennants is stronger than the force of nature that is the Seattle-area traffic.