Todd Stadler's blog

A short history of Julia

I've figured out that perhaps one of my best talents is the ability to make up crap and keep making it up until I get tired of doing so. I'd like to say that this talent has proved useful in some extraordinary way, but all I've ever really done with it is waste space on Web pages like this one.

So it was that I recently found myself writing an "about us" page for Julia's and my wedding site. For reasons that aren't clear to me, I found time to dash off several paragraphs of space-filling hooey, while deciding I didn't have the time to write anything serious. This is how my days often go.

But since Julia likely won't let me keep the filler text, I figured I'd copy it here, to preserve its, er, genius for all time.

Julia was born in Houston, Texas, in 1978.

She sprang fully formed from the thigh of her father, television's Ted Knight, who decided that living in his all-powerful celebrity shadow would be too much for the little child to bear.

She was then shipped off to Bangalore to be raised by itinerant goat farmers until she reached what they called the "age of goat-knowledge". At that point she left them to wander the earth (like Caine in Kung Fu), hoping to find her purpose.

That purpose was soon to be revealed when she was found herself meandering past a sleepy little town called Cape Canaveral, which back then was called Cape Cadaveral, owing to its reputation as the city with the greatest number of mortuaries per capita. Julia, inspired by the majesty of the Skylab program, found herself thinking that with just the right technology, a really good mission statement, and a name change for the town, it could be the locus of a revolution in space travel. And thus was born the so-called "space shuttle" program.

Julia's role in the space program — which she worked on when not attending preschool at the Doogie Howser School for the Mind-Bogglingly Precocious (after which a certain hit TV show was later named) — naturally brought her back to her hometown of Houston.

By 1983, she grew weary of the glamorous life she was leading and traded in the jet-setting and her celebrity-riddled Rolodex for a quiet life that she hoped would be full only of normalcy. Little did she realize that the then quiet villa of Houston was soon to become the nation's fourth-largest city, with all the attendant traffic, pollution, and, yes, even humidity that one would expect. Fortunately, this rapid urbanization was to have little to no effect on her life.

It was at this point in the fake biography that I realized I had enough text to keep the page from looking empty, and so ran out of steam.

Comicstry

As a chemistry teacher, Julia is not unfamiliar with the joke about two atoms, one of whom loses an electron, causing the other to ask if he's sure it's lost (I'll leave the hilarious punchline for those of you who bothered to click on the previous Google link). In fact, her students often remind her of said joke.

Frankly, I'm sick of that joke. I decided there needs to be another joke that chemistry teachers can tell their students. So here's the bon mot I came up with:

Three atoms walk into a bar: a German atom (germanium?), a Polish atom (polonium?), and a Swiss atom (oh, I don't know ... Ytterbium?).

The German atom says to the Polish atom, "I want der SudetenElektron! Give me der SudetenElektron!"

To which the Polish atom replies, "No."

But the German atom is adamant: "I need der SudetenElektron to complete my vaterla ... er, valence frontier!" But still the Polish atom refuses.

Realizing that this is going nowhere, both atoms turn to the Swiss atom and ask him what he thinks.

The Swiss atom, which neither desires additional electrons, nor wants to get rid of any of the electrons it already has, shrugs and says, "Don't ask me — I'm neutral!"

A perfect blend of chemistry, history, and hilarity! I'm so gonna start writing for Leno.