Closer Ventures

Dry Tortugas National Park is home to Earth's third largest barrier-reef ecosystem, topped only by those of Australia and Belize.
It is also home to one of the world's most misleading names, aside from the climate-reversed duo Iceland and Greenland.
Wet Pirate Mini Archipelago - which would be a much better name - is a string of seven tiny Mexican Gulf islands just 110 kilometers from Key West, and can only be reached by boat or aircraft.
Maybe I can avoid a harrowing 35 hour plane trip to Palau for my tropical oceanic paradise.

possible change of occupation

catching up on my national geographic rss feed, i noticed an eye-catching headline.
with the first three words being "France sized shark" I went for the link so fast that i almost threw my mouse off the desk, but the article was only slightly less awesome that what i pictured in my head.
The first shark sanctuary, courtesy of Palau has an area of approximately 600,000 square kilometers. That is a lot of safe sharks.
Only one patrol boat is employed to monitor that vast expanse for violations?
I think I need to fly over there and get a boat license.
Research and money-saving starts now.

not so bad after all

philadelphia gets a bad rep for gun violence, parade violence, riot violence and pretty much every kind of violence.
but philly is one of three u.s. cities on beermenus, alongside milwaukee and new york city.
i can attest to philly's prowess as a great place to sample a wide spectrum of diverse global beer flavors.
go philly.
::clink::

sad comparison

i can't decide which is more depressing:

facebook uses photos of pornstars in sidebar ads for singles
or
the fact that i recognize these girls as pornstars

word play

for amazon.com, you need to sign in to check out.
for a mental hospital, you have to sign out to check in.

naked graph

see any non-traditional parade for evidence of the first category.
the philadelphia naked bike ride and the brooklyn mermaid parade are good places to start.

World War Fears

From BBC comes a revealing and rather embarrassing map of the United States' ground-based missile defense systems that are currently in place.
Paranoid much?

Awesome

I need some new words to denote reactions to various situations.

"Oh the vending machine gave you two bags of chips for 50 cents? Awesome."
"Man I really enjoyed that movie it was awesome."
"I just stubbed my toe, awesome."
"Wireless power is only a few years away? Awesome."

None of these statements have similar levels of excitement, yet I am perfectly content using the same stupid word to express my feelings.

Awesome.

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

salt cereal

honey nut happy o-shaped oat cereal has been prevalent in the corporate kitchen, so i decided that bringing milk to work is a good idea. breakfast really is the most important meal of the day, so i figured i should start eating it again.
today i brought my own liter of milk, labeled it with name and date, played a quick game of fridge tetris, and walked over to the snack dispensers to weigh my options.
hooray for breakfast!
only three of the five containers are filled with edibles.
choices this week are pretzels, cheese crackers and popcorn.
sigh.

skinny is not fat

recently i became painfully aware that racing bicycles are not meant for mountain biking activities.
so next time you want to bunny hop that manhole (ew) cover or jump that curb, just avoid it.

yesterday's after work activities:
dinner from dibrunos
south philly bike ride
nintuesday
adventurous, reckless and borderline idiotic bike ride home

today's after work activities:
bike shop for new tubes
slap face with palm of hand