Klowns in my Koffee

The kids are back. The prisoner exchange was successful. On the return trip, I stopped at the House of Coates to sample the highly rated hamburgers and to gather information about the iconic metal sculptures discovered at the side of the road. See Day 126 for more background. http://klowns-in-my-koffee.blogspot.com/2010/07/day-126-by-side-of-road.html

So, were the burgers "the real deal"? They were pretty good. If you are looking for a hamburger with old-time presence, then this neighborhood bar in the sticks is a good choice if it is on your way. The place looks from the outside like the cast of Deliverance should be on the inside, but it's bright, light and tidy in there. Best hamburger? I don't think so. The Lion's Tap or 5-8 Club shouldn't worry.

The statues? The waitress didn't really know even though they are literally across the highway. The site had been a metalworking company (no surprise) but had become a trucking firm after the death of the owner. The owner was presumably the artist since the sculptures "were made by a guy who died." Good burgers, few words.

My daughter mentioned in passing that she goes to college with the great-grandson of Albert Einstein. Being noticed for that association must be a personal challenge for the young man. Does he use this fact as a pickup line ("My grandfather was interested in the duality of light as both wave and particle. Want to explore some duality of our own?") or does he sit in the back row in physics class and hum?

Popular folklore abounds with cliched examples of child and sibling apples that rotting under their proverbial trees -- the first generation of Hemingways, Billy Carter, the British royal family, Frank Stallone, Frank Sinatra Jr ...

There are also those sequels that do as well or better than the original -- The Return of the Jedi and Enrique Iglesias, for example. (Sorry, Julio, but you and Gene Simmons are merging into the same person -- like Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.)

What do you do with that kind of burden of expectations? Perhaps there's an annual picnic where the Einsteins get together with the Edisons. They invent a new sandwich and then prank call the Steinmetzes.

Einstein's grandson, Micky, like many young people has an easily accessible electronic footprint. From this, we see that he's interested in neuroscience. It may be a coincidence that the pathologist removed Albert's brain after death in hopes that some future neuroscientist would discover its secrets. This isn't exactly nepotism, but is suspicious nonetheless.

His grandson also plays lacrosse and sings in an a capella group. According to Micky, his interesting quirk is "I can eat 6 saltine crackers in under a minute." Princeton, are you listening? Special theory of relativity be damned.

I name my pets after scientists. (Stop that! There's nothing odd about that at all.) This is my cat, Albert Einstein. Here he is seen working on the Unified Field Theory.