A photoblog and other things

I don’t know what other people were doing but I spent most of my day just watching the news regarding the terrorist attacks in London. I was extremely grateful to get e-mails from people who I knew were in the area, telling others that they were ok. So to those of you over in London, I hope you continue to remain safe.

It’s times like these that Wikipedia (that free, online encyclopedia for those not in the know) really shines. They have an excellent summary of the situation as it stands, and I actually found myself wandering off to other parts of the wikipedia site to, for example, read about Pan Am Flight 103. I do this because I’m an information freak and I like to try to understand the reasons why people do things like this. Plus, the poet Sylvia Plath wrote some poetry about the macabre nature of humans and how we are in awe of tragedy. I guess I’m expressing that part of myself by monitoring the Internet.

In other news, it seems Florida is about to be bombarded with another hurricane. The season starts in June and ends in November, and we’ve already had a couple of tropical storms come through. Hurricane Dennis is poised to come past the west coast of Florida. This of course will also likely delay the lauch of the space shuttle Discovery on Wednesday which I am extremely keen on seeing. The space shuttle has delayed a lot of my visits to other cities in the US – I don’t want to plan a trip and then find that the shuttle is going to launch the same time I was due to go on holiday. Oh yeah, my problems are just huge…

I have to quickly blog on what is probably the most impressive fireworks display I’ve ever seen (well, the year 2000 fireworks display in Sydney was pretty good too). It’s not impressive because of the fireworks themselves, it’s impressive because from my lucky vantage point everywhere I look I see fireworks. Suburban South Florida is putting on a heck of a free show.

Is already off to a good start. I woke up this morning with a painful feeling in my mouth that indicated the slice of pizza I had at 3:30am this morning was indeed hot. I spent last night in Fort Lauderdale with some friends mostly attempting to dance to RnB. I succeeded for quite a few hours and then I just got sick of it.

What was most surprising about last night, for me anyway, was that Karma lounge is in fact not dead. I spoke to one of the people behind the bar and they said “yeah, that person who wrote the article got it wrong… we don’t know where she got that information from. She was actually here last week…”. So, there you go. I think they’ve actually turned down the volume by a few decibels too, but there still weren’t many people there.

It’s pretty cool how fireworks can be purchased at the local supermarket for July 4 activities. What I found really funny though were the names of the fireworks, like “Freedom fireworks” and “Desert strike”. Ok, so they’re even trying to put subliminal messages through fireworks these days. I was wondering if when the fireworks exploded they said “Mission Accomplished” (or as the Daily Show put it in an anagram, “C’mon, I lied. So scampish”). I’ll get back to you on that one. Seriously though, there are fireworks going off in quite a few areas when I was looking over my balcony before. There is a pretty cool vibe around the place at the moment.

I’ve worn my “Florida… stay awhile” shirt that has the drawings of graves on an island a few times now. I’ve had quite a few compliments about it so far from people who I think thought that I was being patriotic or something like that, so I’ve had to point out to them what the graves on the island mean and then I explain that I’m moving over here, and that the shirt is me having a go at myself. Ummm, a lot of people don’t get that.

Well, I’m off to watch some more backyard fireworks before deciding what to do tonight. Adios!

I sometimes get curious and find out what people are doing today who I remember from my childhood. Can any of you remember the movie “The Wizard“. I can remember loving this movie at the time because it had Super Mario Bros 3, a huge gaming screen, and a Nintendo Powerglove. Mind you, I haven’t watched it since then… I didn’t want to ruin the childhood memory of it being a great movie. Anyway, there was a girl in the movie, Jenny Lewis, who apart from the guy with the powerglove is one of the people who I remember most from the movie. I even forgot the movie had Fred Savage in it, but I only associate him with “The Wonder Years” and facial moles these days.

I digress. These days Jenny Lewis is actually the lead singer for a band called “Rilo Kiley“. They’re an indie rock band from California and after listening to some of the tunes on their website I thought they weren’t too bad at all. I think their latest CD would be quite appropriate for cruising around on 2-lane American highways.