Beam me up, Shorty... and the Bucky Balls.

My grandmother is a hoot.
She's also a very VERY well read woman.
She may be 95 years old-- but, her insatiable apetitie for reading is pretty much legendary. She starts off in the morning with the financial section, then she hits world news and finally the state section. She has subscriptions to Time, Newsweek, Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and Smithsonian just to name a few. On top of all that- she reads best sellers on both the fiction and the non-fiction lists AND whatever paperbacks happen to be laying around as well as all the shop at home catalogs that deluge the postal service.

As it so happened a few days ago- she was studying up on new scientific technologies. She's done that before. She knew about fuel-cell techno-geeky stuff LONG before the general masses were aware of it. The REASON she studies all that is for investment purposes.

Anyway, her question early one morning was "What's a Bucky Ball?" A few moments later after a quick internet search- we had the answer for her printed out. Just so you'll know what a Bucky Ball is... it is the roundest and most symmetrical large molecule known to man- something to do with carbon. Read about it here.. http://www.imbris.net/~jfromm/bucky/bucky.htm

Now, having HAD that recent conversation and knowing full-well that she'd not just pulled the topic from thin-air, I figured she'd already read across some information and was actually exposing the rest of us to some new tecnology venture she was fixing to invest in. But-- how many almost centenarians actually KNOW about this type of stuff? I mean-- the kind of women that weren't necessarily in the scientific field in their occupation (she was a history and English teacher) for Pete's sake! But- there it is. The fact is.. my grandmother is quite the know-it-all and has very broad interests.

So, when my mother was going through a box of novels she asked my grandmother if she'd like to read any. Mae promptly started going through and culling the ones she wasn't interested in... they were the science-fiction ones! When I asked why, she replied "I don't want to read any of those Beam Me Up, Shorty" stories!

ONLY my grandmother has such a wonderfully rounded sense of humor and the background to go with it! She should have been a comedian! Hmmm... is it any wonder that my mom and I have to struggle to stay "up to speed" when my grandmother and my father are in their element?

Oh- what fun!

I think I'd like to be beamed over to the house next door now-
Scotty!