I have spent all day Avoiding Spoilers for… well, something, and so I’ve been entirely cut off from the Internet. Hopefully nothing blew up or fell apart or became interesting in any particular way since yesterday afternoon or so, because as of right now I haven’t heard about it.

One thing I did hear about before the blackout started, and which you’ve probably heard about as well: Paul Walker died. This is, I’ll admit, entirely meaningless information to me; I couldn’t pick Paul Walker out of a lineup if you paid me to– in fact, I’m not even a hundred percent certain I’m getting his name right, but I’m not about to go Google it to find out. I’ll find stuff. I know I will.

(I will also be ignoring comments on this blog until after I’ve viewed The Program in Question, so if any of you are of a trollish bent, you can’t get me.)

Anyway. I bring up Paul Walker (God, I hope that’s actually his name) not to preen about my lack of exposure to popular movie culture but as an intro to this: no less than four different kids came up to me today to ask me if I’d heard he died. There were also secondhand reports of a couple of arguments starting in various places in the building related to various kids’ opinions on how he died.

One of the four was We’ve Never Done Single-Digit Addition in Class kid, which is kind of astonishing, because it confirms that he does actually notice things once in a while. He even followed it up with a question about the train derailment, which I had heard about but only insofar as I knew that a train somewhere had derailed; I wasn’t really able to answer his question.

Now, four doesn’t sound like much, but my kids are weird like this: if four of them directly asked me about it, I know it was likely on the minds of dozens of them today. Which takes me by surprise, but then the cultural cachet of the Fast and Furious movies has always eluded me a bit. It’s one of those “Christ, they made another of those?” type of series; surely somebody has to be seeing them, just not anyone I ever have a reason to discuss movies with.

I don’t know that there was much of a point to this story; just that they still take me by surprise sometimes. I’m sleepy as hell right now; it was a pretty good day, all told, but getting back in the swing of things always takes a day or two.