More!:

Don't know about you...:

...but I'm inspired. More martial arts & gymnastics for me please!

Breadth of People:

Today we:
1. transported cuffed criminals
2. read to primary school kids who wished me a Happy Thanksgiving
3. met the U.S. Ambassador who gave us an Ambassador's coin.

Dealzzz-ah!

Thanks, James.

Note to self:

Don't EVER invest day-trading stocks again. $#&@!

Intense:

4[] World Championships:

In Boston in February. See you there!

This Will Not Apply When Flying With Me:

My favorite line is towards the end:
'Warnings:
Too numerous to list, but here are a couple'

Good To Know.

Seriously, Priorities People, Seriously:

The decision made during the Clinton Administration coupled with my current occupation makes this topic taboo. Nonetheless, I'm still allowed to have an opinion. Well, that's regulated too, but it's worth it; I don't have to pay for healthcare or decide what to wear to work everyday. Tit for tat.

Being both liberal and conservative, it is this perspective that validates my paramount favoritism towards COMMON SENSE!

When voting, my FL ballot two weeks ago, there was a voting item on this very subject. As a fellow-taxpayer, I was mad enough to karate kick my plastic voting booth - creating a domino effect of elderly detritus. I restrained, however, fearing projectile dentures, hip fracture shrapnel, and an inevitable Golden Girls Gang purse-whipping me into a pulp. Seriously, are gov't officials really spending our time and money on this moot subject. Who gives an eff?! Seriously.

Anyway, enjoy the humor.

Cool things I've seen:

Watching the Space Shuttle take off from across the state last. It was at night and from Tampa Bay, the shuttle traversed the sky from below and to the right of the moon, tangent to, and above and to the left.

For years, I'd measure how cool something was relative to Hoss ramming a toilet with a front-end loader, exploding porcelain everywhere. This was up there. It made me stare at the moon a little bit longer tonight.

Why calculus:

Recently, my dad and I discussed our detest for Calculus. We saw no practicality for it. Bringing it up over a couple beers with brilliant Corey Kerns, Corey nonchalantly gave an example of how it is important and useful. It's salty too. Here's my paraquote I wrote to my dad:


Tides are on a sinusoidal wave. X-axis = time and y = tide height. The derivative plots that sine curve’s slope. As in, the derivative, current, with y axis being speed (of course), plots the change of tide. When tide is full slack or flood, the sine curve’s slope is 0. That corresponds to 0 kts current where the curve (zig zag pattern up and down) passes the x axis.
When tide is passing the x-axis, it is in the middle of its tidal cycle (steepest graphed slope) and has the largest current. The graph of current is at its absolute value peak.

Had that been explained at school, oh, I don’t know, a sea-going service academy where they make us take 16 credit hours of NAUTICAL science, then maybe we would have grasped the ‘importance’ of calc. pff!

Anticlimactic:

You have successfully submitted your athlete resume! If you qualify for any of our schools, camps, or programs, you will be contacted via email. Thank you for your interest in the sports of Bobsled or Skeleton!
Would you like to receive email updates and information from the United States Bobsled and Skeleton Federation? If so, please click below!


is the response I got for filling out an athlete resume on http://bobsled.teamusa.org/. Though, I did get a great response from the USBSF office after I wrote this.

Oof, tough story:

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- Five migrants rescued after 15 days lost at sea ate their dead comrades to stay alive, a Dominican official said Sunday.

One of the five, the only woman in the group, died Sunday in a hospital after the group was found near the Turks and Caicos Islands, said Dominican Minister of Tourism Francisco Javier Garcia.

Garcia said the remaining four, part of a large group of migrants, told him that without food, they ate from the corpse of the last person to die.

A total of 33 Dominican migrants were trying to reach Puerto Rico by boat when they were reported missing by relatives in mid-October. Survivors said they lost their way after the captain abandoned the ship.

Bodies of the other dead were thrown into the sea, Garcia said they told him.

The five migrants were rescued by U.S. Coast Guard helicopter on Saturday and taken to a hospital on the island of Providenciales.

"The other four are dehydrated and have swollen legs but are expected to recover," Garcia said after visiting the survivors with Turks and Caicos Premier Michael Misick.

Many of their relatives presumed they were already dead.

Hundreds of Dominicans take to the sea each year in small boats, many of them homemade, trying to reach Puerto Rico through the dangerous Mona Passage.

In 2004, 36 survivors in a group of 87 migrants drank breast milk, sea water and ate human flesh in desperate acts to survive.