An Ambitious Fruit Fly

I have a very distinct memory from my fifth-grade year. Every time I hear the rousing fanfare from Europe's immortal The Final Countdown (which is every couple of years or so), I'm plunged back into the moment...the crowd of kids backing off in a mighty ripple, gaping, dumbfounded, jealous as I descended into the schoolyard, beckoning for Amanda to join me in my gyrocopter that I had constructed out of an old lawnmower and particle-board and then glide off over the Great Salt Lake, free of brine stench and glistening with the fire of the western sun, all to the tune of that masterful power-ballad.
This is, of course, a heap of bullshit. Beyond the obvious fact that the laws of physics and the engineering prowess of ten-year-old boys do not generally combine to produce even decent pinewood derby cars, much less fully functional aircraft, there are the giveaways of the stinkless Salt Lake, the implication that I was at school until sundown, and the fact that Europe, well, sucks. Come to think of it, I was such a hopeless dork that Amanda, I'm sure, would have never gotten into that gyrocopter, and not just because it was a deathtrap that smelled strongly of the ragweed from my backyard.
But to me, it was real in that I was going to do it, just like at one point I was going to build a vacuum-cleaner hovercraft propelled by bottle rockets and construct an underground spy fortress in my buddy Taylor's backyard. Just who we were going to spy on is a bit hazy, now, but I know that I could sit down and reproduce the plans for the fortress, complete with periscope and IT nerve center consisting of Taylor's Commodore 64...playin' Mappy and Spy Hunter all night long was sure to drive a stake through the heart of the Evil Empire.
Nineteen years later, apparently, I haven't changed a whole lot. You see, I'm going to keep up this blog. I'm going to turn it into a clearing house for linguistics, politics, and super funny satire. And while my wife wouldn't necessarily appreciate Amanda jumping into this gyrocopter with me and taking off over the valley o'Zion, I swear I can hear those dulcet tones of the cock-rock gods cooing that I'm heading to Venus....doodle-oo doo, doodle-oo doo doo...