Thanks Andrew for the mention on your cool blog… I’m honored. I offered to let him use the picture I took in his upcoming book, but I think it has already gone to print. I guess we just met too late.

Anyway, here is another trippy picture of Holland for Andrew; I know he had too many space cakes, and perhaps this is the passed-out-view he saw every morning when he awoke.

This is a real commercial that was made in 1982 right before the AIDS scare. This is perhaps the worst named product of all time.

This is a pretty funny song that this Australian group performed on comedy central. I am easily enterained by nonsense on occasion.

I woke up this morning to find a deluge of comments on one of my volcano pictures on Flickr and I had to figure out what was going on. It turns out that one of the volcano pictures made it to the Flickr home page as one of the most “interesting” pictures for the day. They use some formula called “interestingness” that is a combination of views, favorites, and comments. If you click on the first picture below, you can see some of the comments…

I took this one from about 10 km from the west side of the dam that forms lake Arenal at the base of the volcano. I had the tripod set up for several hours trying to wait for the clouds to arrange themselves in the right way. The good thing was that it was so windy the whole scene changed every five minutes.

After driving around and around and around the volcano on roads that barely qualify as roads and after hopping over barbed wire fence after barbed wire fence, I finally managed to find a nice shot of the volcano. It was not easy to get that horse to cooperate with me. I had to figure out how to say, “I am not a glue-man” in Spanish.

This is the most active volcano in Costa Rica and one of the most active in the world. Later days would take me up higher into the danger zone to get some rather suicidal shots. Those will be coming in a few days…

It started raining pretty hard while we were walking around the streets of downtown San Jose, so we decided to duck into a strange clothes store. While milling around inside, I found these interesting mannequins.

This may be the last update for a while (admittedly, this is a weird one). We are driving up to an active volcano in the north of the country and I may not have internet for a while.

Inside the foyer of the Teatro Nacional were various marble statues that were created in various countries around the world. The three statues - Dance, Music, and Fame - in the foyer are real, and the ones on the roof are reproductions. They used to have the originals on the roof, but the birds’ poop was overly acidic so they moved them to a safer place.

This one is the Muse of Dance and was sculpted in Milan.

This is a really funny video. It’s sort of like the Tipping Point of laughing, but the kids seems to spread the laughing virally very quickly. It’s almost a little bit eerie, but still totally funny.

Here are some doctored Choose Your Own Adventure books…  I read all of these when I was a kid.

I don’t know why I find this funny… but this is a video of a Walkman on zipline with someone screaming on it.

My friend sent me this picture.  This features a marine shaking hands with The Hillary, while flashing the secret “under duress” hand signal with his other hand, since he was obviously forced into this untenable situation.

This went around the net right after the championship game, but I did not see it until recently… This picture was taken when Vince scored the winning touchdown for Texas.

Here is a clever bit on the Daily Show.

Some friends just told me about this episode of Wife Swap that I missed… this woman is something else!

For the past year or so, our living room has been as grey as a Stalineque apartment building, so we are finally adding some color to it. Here is a picture of the base coat before they have done the faux-finishing.

This morning the painters came into the house - there was a white guy that came in first followed by a black guy. They were both here yesterday… very friendly guys. Anyway, when they walked in carrying their paint cans, Ethan darted between them with some crazy Star Wars Jedi move, and I quickly scolded, “Watch out BOY!”. The black guy glared over at me for an instant before I pointed at my son - indicating that he was the “boy”. I think I smoothed over the situation, but I am gonna go hide my VCRs just in case.