My son, age 15, is talking to me about school. One nice thing about teaching is that I'm home to speak with him. I know so much more about his daily life than I did with my two oldest, even though I am very close to both of them. He is telling about mentos and diet coke and how if combined, they explode. He tells me there is a website. I said it must be some urban legend, but he is going to connect me to the site. Now we're talking about the French Revolution and he is laughing about his teacher's drawing stick figures on the board. All of this is happening while I sit in my living room thinking about memes.

I realize our conversation is meme centric - the story about the mentos and coke, the legends about the French Revolution. Yesterday, on the way home from school, we talked about Napoleon and if he were a better general than Wellington (my son is a history fan). I assume the meme in France would favor Napoleon while the meme in England would favor Wellington. That is where I have questions on some of the meme theory. If memes are like genes in a natural selection process, than they must also tend to be local in nature. The meme is a creature of the environment in which it exists. So a meme in France, the same fact, morphs within the limits of its cultural context and becomes altered from the meme in England.

My post also reflects the appeal of blogging. My conversations with Sam are now captured for anyone who chooses to read it, and, more important, to the future me that will read it again some day.