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I was in Altoona last weekend to celebrate my parents’ 40th (wow) wedding anniversery. This is not them. The actual day that commemorates their elopement of so long ago is tomorrow. Hopefully, I will have party pictures up by then.

Today’s shot is Bill and Betsy Hutchinson, good friends of the family. Bill mentioned that he liked the website and I promised a pic of the day. It sometimes is just that easy.

Also for Bill, a page of propane-powered mosquito traps.

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I’ve decided at the age of 31 to have no more guilty pleasures, just pleasures without guilt or apology. So I can now admit that I have some Hall & Oates on the MP3 player and I watched every episode of “Beauty & The Geek.” I can also now freely say that posting will be less frequent until I finish that g**damn new Harry Potter book. It’s a big purple monkey on my back.

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Site of the Day: How to Ship a Hippo

Many of the guests would not look at the pig when it was still intact on the grill, but I thought he had a sweet, contented look of his face. There will be more pictures from the pig roast we had to celebrate my parent’s 40th anniversary posted this evening.

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Site of the Day: http://www.secretfunspot.com/

The bag of laundry I carried down five flights and carted through the rain weighed 33 pounds. That seemed very heavy to me, so I Googled “weighs 33 pounds” to see to what it is comparable.

• You could replace your stock battery with an Optima, but the smallest of these suckers weighs 33 pounds.
• I’m learning about penguins in school. The penguin weighs 33 pounds and is up to 4 feet tall.
• Waldo is 3 months and one week he weighs 33 pounds. He is full of energy and sleeps just as much as he is awake. Eats like a horse and grows like a weed.
• Barrett XM-109 Sniper Rifle, Killer Features: Fires 25mm low velocity HEDP ammunition, Accurate out to 2,500 meters, 46 inches long, weighs 33 pounds.
• A better recumbent bike is the EZ-1 Lite, which weighs 33 pounds and costs 750 dollars.
• The Spray Field Liner weighs 33 pounds, paints a line 2 to 4 inches wide and holds one aerosol line paint can.
• Roman Z. is a young boy who has blue eyes, brown hair, stands 2 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs 33 pounds.
• The U.S. Army is shipping 18 armed Talon 2 UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles) to Iraq in the next few months. The control station weighs 33 pounds and is carried in a small suitcase.

Most things that weigh 33 pounds are considered light. Until you carry them a block in the rain.

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Site of the Day:
From Erik, a simple, yet addictive geometry game.

Note: I am having HTML issues.

Just a little over an hour north of the city are some great hikes along the Hudson. Once a year, I try and get to Cold Spring to do Breakneck Ridge. Ildi is not so keen on hiking, but I promised her that it was an easy one.

I’m not exactly sure how far or high we hiked, because I ordered a map after we got back, but from what I can gather from other sites, we covered most of the Taconic Park. There were numerous vistas to the North, West, and East, and the views were phenomenonal. It was further than I intended to drag my girlfriend, but I used the same trick I use on Matt and Jerry. I don’t tell people how far it we are going until we are way out in the woods and it is too late to turn back.

After one dark cloud,
the sun shone bright, but the breeze was cool and dry. During lunch I noticed that Ildi’s legs are tanner than mine. How do girls do that?

The air was so clear on Saturday that from this vista, looking south over the river and Westpoint, you could actually see the New York skline glimmering on the horizon like Oz (home of the wizard, not the prison). The pic to the right just barely captures it in pixels, but in person, the buildings were as plain as day.

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Site of the Day: Another hiker, http://www.thefatmanwalking.com/

I have to hand it to the folks at Google. The maps application rocks. Not only is it super clear and clean with nicely anti-aliased fonts, but they also have a public API allowing people to make things like this: the Google Map Pedometer. It’s an amazingly simple interface to the maps that lets you trace how far you went on a walk or a run. I used it (as seen above) to show Ildi that she drove me for 5.14 miles on Sunday. This means we can walk at least that far during a hike in Tuscany when we go there this fall.

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Site of the Day:

This ad is all over the Internet, including Hotmail. I’m not even certain what it is for, but I do know that it is killing me. K.i.l.l.i.n.g..m.e!

Nicest behind on the web.

Apologies to my mother, girlfriend, and woman aquaintances.

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Site of the Day: Lots of sites for the bored.

Or maybe Happy Day After Independence Day When You Return to Toiling For the Man.

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I complain a lot about the current administration, but I really do love my country. Here are five things to celebrate.

1. 1.) Amendement numero uno.
2. 2.) While fedoras are out of style for professional men, so are bow ties, so that is a push.
3. 3.) Bourbon is 100% USA. So is the teutonicly named, yet delicious hamburger.
4. 4.) Although 18 is the suggested, in many states, 16 is considered OK. I'm talking about the limit on trout harvesting, by the way, sickos.
5. 5.) Supreme court aside, MP3s will always be free. Like water.

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How did I celebrate my freedom from tyranny? Three words: B…B…Q. Thanks Mary and Aaron!

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Today's pic shows that the fireworks were visable from my roof, keeping me safely ensconced from the masses on a sleepy, virtual Sunday night. It's the little victories. (And I know this pic sucks, but you need a tripod and an SLR to get good fireworks shots.)

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Site of the Day: McSweeney's recommends good, Mike Doughty, and bad "Swimming to Cambodia" (unique does not equal entertaining).

All the main items from yesterday are SOLD. A nice gentleman named Charlie who had Googled “Bear Mountain” offered to buy the VCR. Still available are the Rio MP3 CD Player (I found the remote), 200 Poker Chips, and theVHF and UHF TV Top Antenna, which as you can see in the picture above, is HDTV ready.

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Happy Fourth! Remember being against asinine anti-flag burning amendments does not mean you support flag burning. Just the First Amendment. Drink to that on Monday.

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Site of the Day: “This Machine is to me, what the Kitty Hawk was to the Wright Brothers, or the model-T the Henry Ford, I don’t want to part with it, however to keep this project going and getting into the next stages of developement, it is necessary.”

Jerry just found this in the ancient archives. I had been wearing a hat, but took it off at the table to be polite. This explains my windswept locks, but not why I had chosed to grow it out. Jerry can explain the beard himself.

I was 19 and Jerry was 24. Life sometimes seems like a long time ago, but I do think I am better looking now, so I’ve got that going for me.

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Site of the Day: Weird, unexplainable, and oddly fun to play with: Gravity and a woman.

I take it for granted in competative New York the food will be superb wherever I go. Then, once in awhile, I stumble on something that is steps above excellent, yet relatively inexpensive. On Friday, we found Gavroche on the unlikely block of 14th Street, between 7th & 8th.

In the hidden garden out back, we savored French food that wasn’t really unique, but just prepared to perfection–enough to make this cynical snob actually stop and chew. Every bite was sublime, from thebeet salad with roast pears and roquefort to the scallops and shrimp over risotto. Definitely going back.

– Menu Pages Review
– New York Metro’s Review

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These “100 Words on Pieces…” are killing me. I’m trying not to do the standard review blurb, but I think I end up with something not very informative.

Also, all of them are exactly 100 words. That and one dollar twenty-five will get you a cafe au lait.

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If you combine the shirtless men of the gay pride with the saggy topless middle-age women of the mermaid parade, you get all the nakedness that I would never want to see. Needless to say, you couldn’t have pried me out of Soho this weekend to attend these events. So no boob pics.

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Site of the Day: Similar to Suck.com itself, something I will talk about but not really read: The Story of Suck.com