Complex Numbers

Bloomington

Another ambiguous reference. I could put the state in the title, but what would be the fun in that? Anyway, I mean the one in Illinois, not the one in Indiana.

Hey, at least it's not Springfield. Then it could be any state. Sometimes I think it would be fun to visit every Springfield in the country, mostly to see how many of them were actually named after spring fields and, if so, how many of those have been paved over (my guess: all). But I'd get really tired really fast of all the Simpsons jokes.

Lots of places are like that, you know. You name a place, I dunno, "Oakville," because there's a shit-ton of oaks there, and then you cut down all the oak trees. Then people come to the town, look around, and are like "Why is this called Oakville." "Well, because of the stand of oak trees" "What stand of oak trees?" "Oh, we cut those down years ago." Or you call a city "Peaksville." "Is it named after some guy named Peak?" "No, it's after the mountain." "What mountain?" "The one we leveled to build the city."

Point is, it's extraordinarily rare that whatever they've named the place after is still there today. This is trivial in the case of, say, New York, named after a long-dead Duke of York, but, like... hell, I don't know... the town of Woodbridge, Virginia doesn't have a wooden bridge anymore. Or maybe it does, but not the one it was named after.

Bloomington is kind of like that. According to this,   anyway, it was named after a grove (of unspecified type) called Blooming Grove (so, presumably, some variety of angiosperm). Whether the grove is still there or not is unclear, but I'd put money on "not."

Not that it's a big city or anything. It's actually quite nice, from what I've seen, and you might have noticed that I met Sum1 for dinner and beer at a truly excellent local brewpub. Here's the note he posted, including a very rare pic of Me (I'm the cute one in the picture): "Note: I had a wonderful dinner tonight. A certain some..."

So yeah, I know that this is mostly just rambling. It's too early in the morning for much of anything else. Which reminds me -- time to hit the road.