I'm writing this on Wednesday night at a Motel 6 in Grants Pass, Oregon. If I pay an extra $3 I can get Internet access, but I don't care that much. I can wait a day. I can still record this post tonight and upload it later. I'm pretty sure it'll appear on the blog with the date stamp of whenever I first enter it in the software ... but it's past midnight already, so the day will still be correct.

Somewhere near Portland I heard on the radio that Bill Richardson has been appointed Secretary of Commerce. OK, so the team of rivals is up to two now. As longtime readers know, I like Richardson, so my quick reaction to this is blandly positive.

I also heard that Trade Representative might be Xavier what's-his-name*. My quick reaction to that is negative since I have a vague sense of him as against free trade generally and NAFTA specifically. But that opinion is based on very little, so it might well be revised.

* Dang, what is his name? It escapes me. My instinct is to look it up, but lacking Internet or my books, I can't. (I will experience this twice more before this post is done.)

I didn't listen to the radio for the whole trip, but I had it on again somewhere in central Oregon, cycling through the AM frequencies looking for one with a tolerable signal. The one I found, to my surprise came from Boise, Idaho. Even more surprising was hearing how the locals pronounce the name of their city. I've always said "BOY-zee", but they say "BOY-see". The first time I thought I heard it wrong, but then I heard it a few more times in different advertisements. Definitely BOY-see. How have I gone all this time and not known that?

It makes me wonder what other state capitals I may be mispronouncing. Des Moines comes to mind. I say "duh-MOYN", but do they? Maybe it's duh-MOYNZ, or maybe dez-moyn. Do I really know? I do know that Pierre is "Peer", though I think I was in my 30s before I learned that.

All the capitals mentioned so far have French spellings without French pronunciations. Skimming through the list of capitals in my head, I'm surprised to see how many are French-looking. I count seven: Juneau, Boise, Des Moines, Baton Rouge, Pierre, Montpelier, Cheyenne. (And Little Rock was once Petit Roche, by the way.) That's considerably more than Spanish, which as far as I can tell scores only two (Sacramento and Santa Fe). It also outnumbers native names, for which I count only four (Tallahassee, Honolulu, Topeka**, and Oklahoma City). Odd, since so many state names come from Spanish or Native American names. Not so much with the capitals, though.

** Is Topeka a native American name? I'm not sure, but I can't imagine what else it is. (That's two.)

The other funny thing I notice is how many state capitals have some sort of classical-sounding element. First there's two -polises, Anna and her sister Indiana. Then Olympia, Atlanta, Columbia, Augusta, and Helena form a parade of Roman matrons ranging from goddess to mortal. Columbia is accompanied by her twin brother, Columbus. And the family pet is Phoenix.

I'm tempted to include Albany here, too, which to me sounds like an alteration of "Albania", a catch-all toponym promiscuously applied by the Romans, meaning something like "white land", but I really don't know what if anything this has to do with the capital of New York. (And that's three.)

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