Mark Twain say what?

So I'm reading Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain these days. Don't mistake that for me actually being able to enjoy reading a book, as MTSU is determined the suck every last moment of my fleeting time here with work (apparently there are legitimate reasons why no one takes 18 hours their last semester. I thought it was just superstition!). I came across an interesting passage in which Mr. Twain discusses how having a freakishly good memory like one that, for instance, was able to recite large portions of Monty Python from memory (bonus story: one day in Medieval History, Dr. Haas challenged me to recite the Spanish Inquisition sketch from memory to prove how few things people have memorized. He immediately regretted that challenge.). But I digress. Twain's exact words were

Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore.

Oh no, he didn't! Mark Twain has called out my literary go-to technique "But I digress" from 130 years in the past. Well let me tell you something, Mark Twain, if that is your real name, WHICH IT ISN'T, all my details are interesting. Why? Because I sort memories into Awesome and Extra Awesome, based off of their relevance to most conversation. Awesome categories such as the Best Ninja Turtles, the date of the Battle of Fredericksburg, and the Greatest School Computer Game are stored in long term storage, only to be brought up in very specific circumstances (by the way, the answers to those questions are Donatello, December 13th 1862, and DinoPark Tycoon respectively. editor's note: I just realized those answers were all alliterative. My subconscious must be really well organized! Probably just grabbed a bunch of random answers from the "D" file and updated his Facebook with the time he saved.). Extra Awesome details see the light of day a lot more often, such as How Kansas Could Lose in the Second Round, Who I Don't want to Escape the Zombie Horde with, and Who is Most Likely a Hobbit in Disguise (the answer to all three of those questions is Bean. He had Kansas winning it all, which doomed him. I've seen him play Left 4 Dead so he's more likely to run away from the zombies and I can't outrun him; so the zombies would either overwhelm me or catch me first. And finally, he's incredibly reluctant to adventure, can't grow a beard, is about 4 feet tall and lives in a hole in the ground [I may have made that part up].).

But you're not getting off that easily, Mr. Greatest American Humorist of His Age! I've read your book (Life on the Mississippi) and guess what? Most of chapter 2 is just Huck Finn. I don't mean thematically similar, I mean you literally 19th century copied and pasted a chapter from Huck Finn into your book. What's the matter? Was 59 chapters not enough for your book? (bonus fact: Life on the Mississippi was actually published before Huck Finn came out. In a way, it was the world's first viral marketing campaign, which is pretty cool in retrospect. But Twain should have known that the future would become the past and one day mentioning his one book in his other book would cause countless people to have flashbacks to 11th grade English. The horror... the horror...). But I digress. My point is that I may ramble at times, at least I didn't have to steal my name from my workplace!

Did you think just because William Faulkner called you "the father of American literature" that means you can trash-talk whatever blogs you want? Because that right is actually promised by the First Amendment and you don't have to be putting up with Faulkner's crap to do that. Also, there will be retaliation from the blog itself.

P.S. Graduation craziness has died down a bit so I will chat about my adventures in PCB next!