Wikipedia

It's pretty safe to say that you can measure a person's level of fame by the amount of information in their Wikipedia entry. You're not truly important until your link on Wikipedia goes to your own page. If I were ever to have a published book, for example, I would get a Wikipedia page. This is not an assumption. It's a certainty. I'd create it.

Once when we were in college, my best friend edited the Wikipedia page of my high school to say "The school's most famous graduates are Jessica Stephens and Amy Duncan." We weren't famous. Wikipedia (or someone) took it down.

If you click on any links to Scott Disick's name on Wikipedia, it links you to the page for Kourtney Kardashian. Yeah, I wasn't 100% sure who he was either. He's Kourtney's baby daddy. That has to suck. Apparently he's on the reality show all the time, and he's some kind of...actually, I don't know what his job is...but all you get is a link to your girlfriend's page. You are Not Important, sir.

(And the reason I know that is because I was looking at information about Kim Kardashian's wedding, and then I clicked on links, and it was just a spiral, but you know that eventually all links lead you to the Philosophy page. Wikipedia is deep, yo.)

If I ever do have a Wikipedia page, I want to put something strange on there, like "Amy is an avid collector of miniature things." I'm not, but it would be a cool way to start a collection. I could keep a shelf of miniature things that people sent me based on the information on Wikipedia. It would probably include a variety of things, from miniature marshmallows to dollhouse furniture to tiny action figures. I would be thrilled if someone sent me a teacup pig. You know I've always wanted one. That could go on my page, too. "Wants a teacup pig."

Carl Sagan, Halloween, and Toddler Trickery

Today I thought I'd tell you about the title of my blog. It's a piece of a quote from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, the best TV series about the universe to exist, ever. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is going to be reviving Cosmos sometime in the near future and I AM SO EXCITED. But back to the title. The quote I have on the blog (look right) is one of my favorite Sagan quotes, and the one that gives me the title is: "Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we're made of trillions of cells--within us is a little universe." There's a kickass compilation of Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and other great scientists autotuned and set to music, called The Symphony of Science. Check it out. Anyway, Carl Sagan is highly respected in this house.

So if there's a universe in each of us, then the three of us in my little nuclear family are actually a multiverse, but whatever, it's cool. I'm listening to a dubstep remix of the Imperial March from Star Wars. That's unrelated.

OR IS IT? This is a perfect opportunity to transition into the fact that Calvin was an Ewok for Halloween:

And he made out like a bandit! We went with Jack and Sara and Zach, and it was a lot of fun if kind of cold. There was snow on the ground, which should never happen. He was good for most of it and then we came home and hung out with some of Brandon's work folks.

Finally, a point on the cognitive development of a 16-month-old: He tries to go down the stairs, and when I say "NO!" he picks something up off the ground like "What? Stairs? Never! I was just looking for this broken bubble wand here. Yep. That's it."