Last week I went with the fam to see Top Gun: Maverick at my local cineplex. I admit to a bit of initial skepticism over all the rave reviews its been receiving, but wow — that was a fun night at the movies!

There were old faces, new faces, old faces made to look new, and new faces made to look old. My daughter swooned over Miles Teller; my wife swooned over Tom Cruise; and I swooned over Tom Cruise’s ability to still run like the wind (How does he do it? The man is 60! Don’t you dare suggest it was a stunt double. Tom Cruise will be 90 and still run like he’s being chased by the devil.) It was a familiar formula with just enough twists and turns to make it feel new and fun.

Now, you may be asking yourself how I am going to transition from Top Gun to announcing the agenda for CMEpalooza Fall on October 19. Am I going to compare the rugged handsomeness of Mr. Cruise to the rugged handsomeness of the two co-producers of CMEpalooza? Hahahahahahahahahahaha…no. But I will tell you that the CMEpalooza Fall agenda has some old faces, some new faces, and a familiar formula with just enough twists and turns to make it feel new and fun. There may even be some running/walking involved, but we will save details on that for later.

There will be many more details and updates to come in the following weeks. For now, take a look at the agenda and mark down the date of CMEpalooza Fall in your calendar (it’s Wednesday, October 19). One of the new twists that I hope to add is that we require all faculty to pick a call sign (like Maverick, or Goose, or Viper) and use that instead of their names during the sessions. I haven’t told Scott about this yet, but I’m sure he’ll love it (mine is going to either be “Zeus” or “Hoss”. It’s hard to narrow down to one.)

Scott and I like to play this little game where I send him an email saying “Hey, I updated the CMEpalooza archive with links to all the sessions from the previous CMEpalooza” and then he responds by saying “I thought you did that months ago, you doofus” and then I respond by saying “No, I just did it today, duh” and then he responds back with “It’s August, and the last CMEpalooza was in April, you ding-dong” and then I respond back to him with “Yeah, I know, I was there, duh” and on and on. He’s funny when he gets annoyed.

(Quick aside: while we may poke fun at each other on the blog, neither of us has ever written anything as devastatingly backhanded as what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Henry David Thoreau after meeting him for the first time:

Mr. Thorow [sic] dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character–a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion and becomes him much better than beauty. On the whole, I find him a healthy and wholesome man to know.

Now that’s a vicious compliment.

The point of all this is to say that the CMEpalooza archive has been updated and you can find links to all of our sessions there. There are a lot of them. Enjoy!

Hi all, Derek here. Just checking in to let you know that Scott and I are hard at work (or hardly working, am I right?) putting together the agenda for CMEpalooza Fall on October 19 and should have an update for you, oh, I don’t know, sometime in August? Let’s go with that. Make sure you mark it on your calendars now.

On another note, I just happened to notice that we now have 800 people signed up for our blog notifications, which is crazy for a couple reasons. First, it’s crazy because when I first created the blog, I didn’t even realize people could “sign up” for it until people started signing up for it and I would get an email notification telling me every time someone signed up. Unintentionally savvy marketing, which should probably be the CMEpalooza motto.

Second, it’s crazy because 800 people have intentionally signed up to get an email whenever we write something on the blog. I am, of course, taking this as confirmation that you all love my haikus, Top 5 lists, Sixers references, and book suggestions, and that I should write about them even more. Message received!

As a thank you to our loyal readers, I am including some of the jokes that CMEpalooza Spring participants included in our end-of-meeting survey. Are they good? Well…good is in the eye of the beholder. Hopefully some of them make you chuckle. Here they are:

CMEpalooza Jokes

When they dug up Beethoven’s grave, they found a little man erasing musical notes. They asked him what he was doing, and he said “I’m decomposing.”

A grasshopper walks into a bar and the bartender says, “We have a drink named after you!” So the grasshopper says, “You have a drink named Steve?”

Dad joke of the day: “People are shocked when they find out what a bad electrician I am!”

What concert costs just 45 cents? 50 Cent featuring Nickelback!

What do you call a pudgy psychic? A four-chin teller.

There were 2 cows in a field. One cow turned to the other and said, “Hey, have you heard about this mad cow disease?” The other cow said, “What do I care? I’m a helicopter!”

And now for a funny joke: The Philadelphia Eagles! Bahahahahah! (note from Derek: this was mean and uncalled for. Probably from a Cowboys fan.)