In Memory of Thag Simmons

School is starting soon.  Maddie is excited about her new school schedule, which she just recently received, and of course she's looking to see who else is in her classes this year.  It's not going to be a bad year, and in fact it should be a pretty good one, I suspect.  Early on though, it might get pretty busy.

Maddie was in her small group tonight, that online small group that she goes with each week, and it's still going strong.  And long.  It's fun though, and she has a good time.  Meanwhile, Mom and I were watching one of our favorite bloggers on our television, one of the ones that travels around and shows you those roadside America sort of places.  For example, we were watching his half-hour journey through that wax museum in Pigeon Forge.  While others may enjoy posing next to some strange visitors from the Uncanny Valley, Mom and I aren't exactly excited to go.  Posing for pictures next to wax celebrities doesn't sound like the most exciting thing we can do, although clearly others were happy to go through and take pictures with life-sized figures that look vaguely like celebrities.  There were other places we were watching tours of, including a Big Foot Festival and a back yard dinosaur area that was pretty immense.  I was happy to discover the story of the thagomizer.  Just to date myself, I remember the cartoon strip, "The Far Side," where an early cave man first labeled the stegosaurus tail, naming it after the late Thag Simmons. 

 Apparently, Thag must have fallen victim to that stegosaur tail, the one with spikes on it.  Anyway, further research on my end discovered that a paleontologist was giving a lecture not much later, and actually called the tail a thagomizer.  And after that, Dinosaur National Monument actually made labels with that name "thagomizer" on it.  And then it appeared in a book, and also elsewhere... and soon enough the joke spread so much that it became actuality:  today, that's the stegosaur tail name.  Hilarious.

This led to a small discussion about comic strips in newspapers, at least a few of them that I loved growing up.  My favorite for a good season was "Bloom County," of which I was a rabid fan.  I still have several books with these comics in them.  Of course, "The Far Side" was a huge comic back then.  And early on, I remember loving "Garfield" of course.  But "Calvin and Hobbes" entered the scene, and that one was a brilliant marriage of imagination and artistry.  I have books for all these, except maybe "Garfield."  Comic strips like that... I don't really know if they're that much of a thing anymore.  They aren't the thing we all scramble to look for in the daily papers, and I really don't even know if they have a section anymore in the Sunday funny pages.  That's what my dad's dad used to call them:  "The funny papers."  He'd say when leaving, "I'll see you in the funny papers!"

Anyway, we have the books filled with these comics now, and I pulled out a few to look through tonight, showing a few with Maddie.  I don't think she's interested at the moment.  Maybe later she'll scan through them.  I remember reading through them all, from "Peanuts" to "Hagar the Horrible" to even "Mark Trail" and "Dick Tracy."  The comic pages were something to look forward to, a big collection of art and humor. Some were legendary.  Some were pretty lame.  But it was a good read nonetheless.

Speaking of which, we read from "Leia" tonight, and we're moving through the story fairly quickly.  We got to bed early after that - I'm trying to get a good night's rest each night.