And just how did we get here?

Ever have a conversation and at the end wonder how in the world you got to that topic? Just for clarity, I'm referring only to those times when all parties have been sober. Conversations that took place when you or one of the other participants were drunk, stoned and/or high do not count, as when one is drunk, stoned or high one generally forgets the protocol of saying "Excuse me, but I'm going to completely change the subject now." And if you were drunk, stoned or high, you probably don't clearly remember any of the conversation anyway.

So today at work, we're minding our own business working and...stuff...when we start talking about books because one of the women is going to college and was telling and showing us a text book for a college class. That led to the topic of how there are books in some really old college libraries that are bound with human flesh. No, seriously! Okay, perhaps I should back up a bit. We started out the morning talking about how whale vomit is used to make the really expensive perfumes, so when the textbook topic came up, books bound with human flesh was just a natural topic to bring up. You know, one gross fact leads to another.

So then J (ha ha, no one will ever guess who you are!) starts talking about how he should write a book and then leave it in his Will that when he dies, he wants the book bound with his flesh. And of course how, if he did put that in his Will, his son would just assure everyone that he was smoking some good shit the day he wrote his Will.

Now the only logical place for the conversation to go at this point is...what would happen to J's body after he died? I offered to drive down I-80 with the window open and let the wind carry his ashes onto the windshield of the other vehicles. Then we discussed other places that ashes could be scattered. The State Capital, the lawn of the White House, and Arco Arena were all good choices.

Hopefully by the time J dies, there will be a new arena in Sacramento. In the same line of thought, hopefully by the time J dies, the Kings will be playing like a professional basketball team again. Anyway, J said scatter his ashes on the remains of Arco Arena, that it will probably be an office or something by then.

Which of course led to speculation about whether the Kings would get a new arena, and how Sacramento needs an arena because the acoustics at Arco suck so badly a lot of artists just skip over Sacramento on their tours. And then turned to will the Kings stay in Sacramento, or will the Maloofs move the team to Las Vegas, where the Maloofs own the Palms casino.

Which led to the question of whether or not an NBA team (or any professional sports team) could do well in Las Vegas, and if other casinos would be willing to give up betting on NBA games to get an NBA team to come to town.

In summary, we went from "College textbooks are really expensive" to "I just don't think the casinos in Las Vegas are going to give up the revenue they make from people betting on NBA games" in one conversation. Wow.

Tomorrow, I'll try to tackle how a joke about French bubblegum led to a debate about whether the war in Iraq is just or unjust. And coming up in a future blog: If you're buying a house and someone once died there of natural causes, do you really think the dead person has been waiting for you to buy the place so he/she can haunt you?