Welcome back. I took a week off and traveled to the great Northwest. You can read a little bit about it in Saturday's paper.

Here's a test to determine whether you really believe Norfolk is home: you go up to the flight attendant after a flight and say "It's Naw-fuk. Not Nor-fork! We are not the utensils from the northern land!" I don't have the personality to do it, but I thought about it after a recent flight. Hard. I find this very frustrating because there is no "fork" in the name!

One other story. While touring a brewery, I ran into a guy wearing a T-shirt that read "Han Shot First." Having only recently learned what "Han Shot First" meant I gave the guy some ribbing. Plus, I was anxious to show off I knew what it meant. And besides, please, if you know what "Han Shot First" means, you're a Star Wars dork. I'm OK with that. So I go up to the guy and said "what's worse, me just learning what that means or you owning the shirt." We went back-and-forth over which was worse, but then decided it was him for owning the shirt. But for the rest of the tour, I think the guy may have been annoyed with me. The lesson here, obviously, is don't make Star Wars jokes at breweries.

A little bloggage:

This is a great story about a dude who looks like Gary Busey and even kind of acts like him.

One other thing: I wanted to go back and look at my column from earlier in the month about the word "please" on Portsmouth election signs. The  winning mayoral candidate had "please" on his sign. Two of the three winning council candidates had "please" on their signs and two of the five winning school board members had "please" on their signs. Not a bad record.

Finally, because I've been away, I didn't get a chance to link to last week's column about crosswalks. I specifically like the image in the comments about walking across like you're in a beauty pageant. And walk, and stop, and pose, and smile, and turn, and walk.