Aloha da Shark Tours

From the Honolulu Advertiser...

A proposal moving through the City Council makes it illegal to operate shark tours on O'ahu.

Two businesses, North Shore Shark Adventures and Hawaii Shark Encounters, would be forced to close or change their operations if the bill passes.

Sounds like there is some possibility of an exemption for the existing businesses. But then again, how can you believe something published in the Advertiser after they colluded to announce little baby Obama's birthday, knowing that he might want to grow up to become our first African Muslim president?

Notable or Not

Sometimes you just have nothing to blog about, and sometimes you see a bunch of things. Here are three things I thought were interesting.


Via a lefty blog I read, I finally found some art I can appreciate. It's supposed to be the bull market pinning Bernie Madoff to the wall, but it looks more appropriately interpreted as the rest of us getting the shaft from a flatulence-powered Wall Street.


Via one of Dara's Facebook friends who posted a pointer to Wired, I see that researchers at the Kansas State have mapped the concentration of the seven deadly sins across the US. It's a bit hard to say what this means, but I invite you to ponder its meaning for your place of residence compared with others. Sorry you Haligonians, US data only.


And the latest on the fate of newspapers from a favorite of the geeky side of Internet culture, Clay Shirky. Worth reading and pondering.

Plastiki

Much as I try not to follow the exploits of people with way too much money and their efforts to spend it in amusing or charitable ways, I couldn't resist this story in the SFChronicle. It seems one of the de Rothschild progeny is about to launch Plastiki, a catamaran made of two-liter plastic bottles.

Pier 31 is ground zero for Plastiki, the strangest-looking boat ever built in San Francisco, a fantastic vessel, a twin-hulled catamaran 60 feet long, made of 12,000 2-liter plastic drink bottles filled with dry ice. It's bound to a frame made of woven plastic, held together with heat-welded tape and steel bolts.

As you might guess, anyone with enough money to finance this thing can afford a pretty snazzy web site, too. On it, you will learn that the toilet (not the head, it seems) is:

a separating composting toilet; worms and coconut husks get added to the solid waste enabling fast breakdown of the bad stuff.

Eww.

Not sure about the dry ice reference in the Chronicle story. Garrett can tell you that dry ice and plastic soda bottles make great dry ice bombs, but that would seem not to be a great idea here. I also just found out from that Wikipedia article on dry ice bombs that they're illegal in California -- a felony, no less! That will be news to our unnamed friends who schooled Garrett in the technique.

Everyone into the "Pool"

I have always had occasional opportunities to get in on some football pool or bet basketball brackets or get some other sports action. It has always been so seldom I go for it just because its sort of a novelty. Enter my current job site where one of the engineers is taking action every week on every sporting event you can imagine. Last week he covered NFL, College Football, Tennis, Nascar, Baseball, Golf, not to mention something called the survivor pool and some side betting on what takers would perform worst in the NFL pool. I'm waiting for a game of alley craps to breakout at lunch. I am not much of a gambler but I enjoy taking a chance on the NFL pool. The pots are sizable and there is always some smacktalk on the job regarding the winners and losers. Some of the schemes to make a sport bettable for a group are interesting and unusual. How do you turn a golf tournament into an opportunity for 30 guys to bet collectively against each other, its involved and takes some work to organize and analyze the results while keeping it fare. I have to hand it to the guy he is on top of it all the way. I just hope 1 week he will have to hand it to me.

Fall Color West Coast Style

We really don't get fall color around here to speak of. You need to drive toward the Sierras to get anything resembling the kind color of color you get back East, and even then it's got a washed out western feel to it. Our vigilant free press, always in search of a controversy, has helped us all out in our search for fall color by publishing the foliage smackdown. By any measure, though, this is pretty bad when it comes to fall colors to look forward to:

"Driving inland from the North Coast, Eureka to Redding, is gorgeous," Taggart said. "The pines pop with the deep red leaves of poison oak vines."

Poison oak climbing up bark beetle infested pines! West coast colors rock!!! Take that you snobby New Englanders.

Handsome Fellow

5th Blogoversary & Still No Clue

What is this going to be - the 5th anniversary for the Blog and yet I STILL CANNOT UPLOAD photos to the side bar - like your Hawaii photos. Doesn't matter - picasa, flickr... Tell me oh Blog-Master... How the heck do I do this?

Halifax Report

Garrett is officially at Dalhousie University in Halifax now! We just got back last night and have almost recovered from the four hour time difference. Halifax is a really nice city, with lots of things to see and do. The school looks great, with classic stone buildings and terrific facilities. We attended the international student orientation proceedings until Garrett chased us off. They had a lot of international students. Most were exchange students, but there were quite a few degree candidates like Garrett. If they were giving an award, Garrett would have won one for being the U.S. student from the farthest away.

Since hanging out with his parents wasn't helping Garrett's ability to meet other students, we went sightseeing. We drove down to the tiny Nova Scotian fishing village of Peggy's Cove one day and ate dinner while the sun set and the waves crashed on the rocks. The next day we drove down through Mahone Bay and on to Lunenburg. The scenery is quite stunning, with lots of lakes on land and rocky inlets on the ocean. Fortunately we had stunning weather to match. As we soaked up the mid-70's temperatures in calm weather, someone told us they thought this was the most sunny days they'd ever seen in a row. It will certainly be a bit different in a few months, that's for sure.

Pictures on Flickr tell the story.

Holiday with the Harris'

Just had a great visit with the Harrisburg Harrises. We swam, found a ton of clam shells on the beach, caught a GINORMOUS bass and a lot of really little perch, then played Wii Boxing, rode bikes and Thomas had his first no-training wheels ride. Francesca is a delight! She's getting so big, knows how to work all the electronics and though you can't exactly understand what she says, you can't miss her meaning. It was a great visit but we missed you all - especially Uncle Mike who's laboring on Labor Day, since he's 23 days from the Govt. fiscal year end. In his honor Thomas and I caught this fish.