This weekend Jen and I drove south to St. Mary’s County, Maryland, for a local tradition: The spring dinner, featuring stuffed ham and fried oysters. Not unlike many of the fireman’s dinners you may have been to, there are a lot of old men selling tickets outside the firehouse, and you enter a large hall (in my experience, they’ve moved the trucks out of the garage, but down in the County they have a whole meeting hall above) where one of the ladies’ auxilliary seats you. Usually there’s some folks at your table, and you make your introductions while they start passing you plates heaped with food. This year the ham was spicy and the oysters had been cooked perfectly, so they were crisp and delicious. Unfortunately, we were seated next to some older women who kept to themselves and hoarded the oysters.

I find this article sad, not because people are possibly strapping their children into incorrectly fastened car seats, but because estimates place a quarter of this country’s population reading at or below a fifth-grade level. I think if you read that poorly and you’re over the age of twenty, you shouldn’t be allowed to have children. How are you gonna help them with their homework when they’re in the sixth grade?

Google Fun. Apparently there was an AA baseball catcher named Bill Dugan (not to be confused with the athletically-named Jumping Joe Dugan), who played two years of ball starting in 1884. At this point, his stats on Google place him directly behind me and above another Bill Dugan who lives in Cali and who’s been making video games for a number of years now.