Take your shirt off / spin it round like a helicopter

Virginia is for lovers. I guess that's why I drove all the way through without stopping. They don't cotton much to us h8t0rz.

Baltimore to Raleigh is plenty far enough to drive in one day. Traffic on the beltway was pretty reasonable, but as soon as I got off the beltway, I-95 South in northern 'Ginny--that was a beast straight out of Revelations. Wormwood for real. The worst part was the fakeout. They had one of those digital signs up saying "bad traffic to exit whatever". It was aboot 20 exits down. When I finally got all the way down there, it turned out the bad traffic was hardly as finished as I had been led to expect.

Anyway, I made it. Tomorrow is the shortest leg of my road trip, Raleigh to Wilmington. Intrastate. Should be a breeze. Apparently it's too long a drive for Kenny, however. I'll have to leave him behind to fend for hisself on New Year's Eve, and come back and watch the Cotton Bowl with him. It's on at 11 in the morning (2 January), so he's going to "Tivo" (read: generic DVR) it. We have a bet going. Kenny, with a cry of "Roll Tide", is for [Ala]Bama, the old-school powerhouse foosball program. I, armed with superior intelligence, am all in with upstart Texas Tech. New York Times Sunday Magazine article by Moneyball author Michael Lewis, don't fail me now; there's a six pack of $6 or less value on the line.

So I've been reading more of Bill Simmons' Now I Can Die in Peace (I got sidetracked by Al Franken and read his entire book). Inspired by an early Simmons column, I decided "Night Train" would be an awesome nickname to apply to myself. "Night Train" Willemain has a certain poetry to it, and I do have a penchant for staying up until the wee hours. Not everyone appreciates it as much as I do, however. I'm just going to toss it out here and see if it has wings.