All kidding aside, this story from October, 2003 makes my blood boil: RESOURCE DAMAGE AT YELLOWSTONE’S LONE STAR GEYSER 2 geniuses in a pickup truck went off-roading in Yellowstone and did a fair amount of damage near a geyser, then obligingly told the rangers everything they needed in order to bust them. The Salt Lake Trib had more information after the incident on these two geniuses and their adventure in the wilderness – with excellent snark provided by the reporter, who implied the pair were in need of an IQ test, rather than a sobriety test. I love the part…
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The other night, the Blogrolling.com site was down for a second, and I lost the entire sidewall of the blog for a few minutes – it was just hacked away, then mysteriously reappeared later when they came backup. It was unnerving. However, it’s working mo’ betta now. A site to check out later in more depth: Topic Exchange (yes, I probably go to Technorati too often, too)
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Just in case my mom is ever plunked down in front of a computer and shown my “blog” and all the wacky detritus of my life that washes up in it, here’s a category just for her and the few family members that might stop by. And here’s my dad – fresh out of high school, with an unlikely thatch of hair that at the time was bright, bright red: I retouched this a bit because my aunt had all the old photos in their beautiful old hand-cut and embossed mattes, and she wrote the names of all the people…
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Via a link to a link to a link (beginning at In the Shadow of Mt Hollywood and contuing via this article in The Atlantic on “The Organization Kid,” I eventually got to this essay from 1991: The Other Crisis in American Education – 91.11 They were interesting articles, and I was pondering my own educational experiences (which could best be described as “unmotivated boredom”) while reading them. I had been looking for a descriptive term for the kinds of over-scheduled kids that have become legion in middle-class American life; as a childfree adult I had looked on aghast at…
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Ugh, I hate Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, I wear my International Hat in addition to my Help Desk Hat and my Group Hotels Hat and all the other little hats stacked on top of my noggin. So I take calls from travelers who will be flying outside of the US, and they’re a fussy, demanding lot. The regular international agent is always off on Tuesdays – she works a 4 x 10 week (4 hours a week, 10 hours a day). Some of the work is interesting – fares, routes, and so on. Much of the work is tedious – there’s…
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Yes, it’s that time again, pioneers – yes, today we mine the search phrase log for some more Blogon Poetry. And this month, in honor of Valentine’s Day, it’s all about the luuuuuuuuuuuurve. can you spell viagra? sexy toenails and pictures 2004. piercings albert padlock, master slave restaurant plug wet… peekaboo bug holly hack, samuel pepys naughty bits. fried chocolate new york alton brown orlando bloom. real redheads with green eyes, redheads with braids; avoiding negative people — aol bad stuff. Okay, that probably caused only a few people to bleed from their eyes and ears, now let’s have some…
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I ran across this news item in the Chicago Trib today: Pilot urges passengers to discuss faith(subscription) The Advocate had an interview they called “exclusive” with him, notable for the fact that after his “God told me to witness” announcement, some passengers were so creeped out by it that they tried to call relatives on cell phones. Thanks to Accordion Guy for links to more discussions at The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: And now, what do I think? I think this pilot is a nut. I think anybody that feels the need to “share” that…
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Got up, eventually, or at least became conscious while listening to :NPR’s “Sunday Edition.” For some reason my dreams were all mixed up with some college basketball team’s woeful performance in a tournament. In the dream I was telling one of the players that they were an embarassment to dream about and they needed to hustle, hustle, hustle the ball more. I don’t even like basketball, what was that all about? Okay. Needed coffee soon after that. David brought some up (he often does that on weekend mornings, the little muffin) and found something to wear and toddled off to…
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Another entry to the England trip journal is now posted under the September archives. It covers the last day or two in London before departing for the Cotswolds. In looking over the diary entries again after several months’ rumination time, I’m convinced we didn’t spend enough time in the Cotswolds, and spent too much time trying to cover too much ground. Next trip, we’re planning on going back to the Cotswolds with a car, so that we can get into the little villages and do a lot more walking in between. So beautiful there.
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We actually got out of the house and went cross-country skiing, just as we planned. Amazing! There’s this place that’s not in the house called the “outdoors,” and we were in it for a while. Conditions weren’t totally ideal (it could have been about 5 or 10 degrees colder, the snow was a bit sticky in the tracks) but it wasn’t bad. We went to the forest preserve/ bike path loop nearest us, and there was just enough snow base to ski on, but not quite enough to make you forget that you were skiing on an asphalt path. I…