The Beach by Steven Wright Originally Published in Rolling Stone Magazine - Summer 1986 THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE BEACH. I, Phillip, a small boy of twelve, lay exhausted, not knowing if I was sleeping or if I was daydreaming that I was sleeping. Gently I rocked back in forth in my hammock, a hammock woven out of the eyelashes of 1000 deer. There was always a gentle breeze at the top of the 300-foot stainless-steel trees where my hammock was located. All the trees were stainless-steel in the Shiny National Forest. Some of the trees had been sawed down and cut into 60-foot lengths, then sold as flagpoles to people who lived in reality, many, many years away. I had never worked so hard in my life as in these past few hours. My clothes proved that I had labored, stained with confusion, compliments and criticism, all things that are not machine washable. I was living on Water Island. A small island, sizewise. The island had no shore. All islands are above sea level, but this was ridiculous. The entire land mass was 200 feet above the ocean. All sand. Not one human had ever been near the water. And why the hell should they? You don't see fish trying to get on the roofs of buildings. The year was a very long time ago. The island was ruled by a king. King Sammy. King Sammy lived in the Great Formica Castle, located at the bottom of Sand Valley. The king experienced temporary insanity every day. The Formica grew wild. There was much Formica left over after the castle was completed. The extra Formica would be sold to people who lived in reality, many, many years away. Nobody ever imagined that parts of King Sammy's castle would end up in kitchens. The king was the king because he controlled gravity. That was the only reason he was king. Which was good enough when you think about it. If he didn't like you for any reason, he would snap his fingers and you would float higher and higher until he snapped them again and you would stay at that height forever or until he brought you back down again, maybe. People were living at different heights all over the place. The people the king hated the most were very high up in the sky, sitting on stainless-steel chairs. The people who who lived in reality, many, many years away, would look into the sky and invent the word "star." They would also invent the word "shooting star," which was actually a person on a chair that the king was moving to another position. The reason I lived in a hammock at 300 feet was I was a waiter at the castle, and one night, entranced by the beauty of the king's niece, I accidentally served soup on flat dishes. I smiled at the young girl, the king snapped his fingers, and I went up through a skylight and have been living at 300 feet ever since. I overtook Styrofoam Canyon. To please King Sammy and again live on the ground was indeed my goal. I was notified of my chance to do this one day at about an hour before the beginning of time. A bird flew to my hammock delivering a small letter. An invitation to possible fate. It was from the king himself. It said, "Dear Phillip: As you know, this year I will be celebrating my birthday on August 11th. If you can arrange a unique festival I will again allow you to live on the ground or at least at eye level and maybe date my niece, Princess Sammintine. I know your great-great-grandfather invented socializing. That is why I'm giving you this chance. If not, I'm sure you will be reaching further heights. Sincerely, King Sammy." Actually my great-great-grandfather was really a hermit and invented socializing just as a joke. So here was my chance to redeem myself and live on the ground again. I decided I would go to sleep and dream about what to do. Often I would wave goodbye when I went to sleep. As a small boy I would sometimes sleep with my eyes open so all my dreams would take place in my room. It was raining. There was a great rainbow. Rainbows over Water Island were made of a light plastic. I was standing on a cliff looking out into the great ocean. The ocean was called Land Ocean. Just then a herd of deer ran by. None of them had eyelashes. The water was beautiful. The king loved water. Hmmm hmm. The king was very fond of water, to the point where he installed a pool that surrounded the entire castle. Other kings would later copy this idea. King Sammy could not swim. People who were great swimmers were despised by the king and forced to live on twelve-foot chairs. My dream then switched to housekeeping, which startled me awake. Yes, yes, the king loved water. If only Water Island had a shore. I began to work. I got rid of the sand the only way I knew how, I vacuumed it. Night and day I vacuumed until the sand on Water Island got lower and lower, closer to the ocean. Inadvertently, I was inventing the beach. It was the night of August 10th. I needed much help. So I hired hundreds of small children to help remove the sand. I gave them little plastic buckets and little plastic shovels. The children removed tons of sand. They worked very hard, although they thought they were playing. Soon the land was level with the water. An unusually beautiful sight to see for the first time: the shore, the beach. I walked up and down this peaceful area trying to avoid the broken glass. I wrote a letter to King Sammy. "Dear King Sammy: Meet me where I'm going to be. Sincerely, Phillip." I then prepared the festival. I brought loads of food and ale packed in boxes that were built in the Styrofoam Canyon. I brought small, horizontal fireplaces that stood on little legs. I hired a group of minstrels who could only play music too loud. Fate lessons of the past and present were now in session. Tradition was about to begin. King Sammy arrived at the beach with fifteen court jesters, his wife, Edna, Princess Sammintine, and several other men and women who were walking around at different heights. Some of them he really didn't like and made them arrive in their underwear. People in reality would do this willingly, many, many years away. The minstrels began to play. The king danced with the waves. I danced with the shadow of the king, and the idea of Princess Sammintine kissed the back of my memory of the events that took place. We drank until we almost drowned on land. A seventy-two-year-old childhood friend of the king cut the plastic rainbows into circles and filled them with air to create colorful bouncing balls. As the king snapped his fingers to the music, people were flying up and down all over the beach. The children with plastic buckets were now heavily into the construction of little castles made of sand, so the king would feel at home. The more the king drank, the more he liked the people, and the more he liked the people, the lower they were to the ground. Soon people were actually lying down on little cotton flags all over the beach. I invited a few of the great swimmers on twelve-foot chairs. The king ordered them to stay in their chairs unless someone was drowning. They wore bright orange shorts. I had a waterproof pen. The ocean was very calm. The king wanted bigger waves. So I drew huge waves on the ocean. The ships didn't understand. As the madness continued, I made my way over to Princess Sammintine. I asked her if she wanted a massage. She said, "Yes, but not physically." I said, "How do you like the beach?" She said, "Well, it's kind of sandy." I apologized for the beach's being sandy. Then I said, "Will you marry me?" She said, "No, you're boring, and besides I've seen fatter legs on a bird." I smiled at Princess Sammintine and accidentally served clam chowder on flat dishes. The king snapped his fingers, and I went up 300 feet onto my hammock in the sky. I lay there swinging in the breeze, knowing that a situation like that would never take place again.

"I like talking about little things, like lint. Well, and the speed of light, which is not a little thing."
The Onion's AV club has a fantastic interview with comedian Steven Wright here.

I hope everyone got good and tight while playing the 2003 State of the Union Address Drinking Game.

Do they really sterilize the needle before givng someone a lethal injection?

Thanks, S-A. Students Tempt Blue Screen for Fun By Brian Briggs

Seattle, WA - Two hours worth of work lost on a term paper or coding project is a nightmare that most students like to avoid, but many students are tempting fate just for fun. A new, dangerous game is sweeping college campuses and it is causing more harm to academic records than unlimited bandwidth ever did. It's called "Blue Screen Chicken" (BSC) or "DLL Duel" by the participants. It's a face-to-face showdown of wills over who will flinch and save first.

The game is usually played at college computer labs. Students decide on several programs, usually between 8 and 10, that use large amounts of resources or that are particularly crash prone (Netscape 4.7 with a Java applet loaded, ICQ and MS Money are common choices). These programs are loaded into memory before starting work on their projects. Now the race is on. The students must continue working on their project without any safety net until someone chickens out and saves, prints or does anything else to preserve their work. A crash by either competitor ends the game in a draw.

"I noticed the computer started slowing down. The mouse got sluggish. I was torn between saving my hour and a half of work and beating that bastard Goldman," said Ryan Hendricks a self-proclaimed BSC addict. "When I ALT-Tabbed back to Word from Photoshop, It took a full 10 seconds for the screen to re-draw. I wasn't gonna give in, but the for some unknown reason I decided to listen to some tunes and started RealPlayer. Blue screen for me and another victory for Goldman."For many students losing a game of BSC means late nights, missed deadlines and lower grades. Professors report that "losing a game of BSC" has become the top excuse students give for late projects surpassing "There was 2 for 1 on pitchers at Shooter's last night."

Many computer lab monitors have expressed concern over the competitions. "To the students, it's all fun and games, aside from their potential minor loss of a paper. But WE'RE the ones that have to go give the machine the three-finger salute and uninstall all those buggy programs. That pisses me off," said lab assistant Dan Yaeger. "I mean, this is just work-study. I shouldn't actually have to DO anything."Fran Kessler, a Debian Linux user is the champion of BSC on her campus. "Well, I never lose. My box never crashes so I never have to worry about losing my term papers. However, the professor can't open OpenOffice.org .sxw files, so I still get screwed in the end."

For some the standard DLL Duel isn't enough. These thrill seekers engage in extreme versions of the game where the competition is held during a lightning storm, or only hours before the project is due. One BSC player compared playing the game to other extreme sports such as mountain biking and snowboarding, "I don't have any athletic ability, but that doesn't mean I can't play with fire."

For a growing number of students "playing with fire" means a crash and burn. The thrill of winning quickly fades and they move to riskier behavior such as loading Windows 95. It's a vicious cycle that usually ends with academic expulsion. If you find yourself in this spiral a hotline has been set up to assist you at 1-800-DONT-CRASH.

Via memepool: It's Home Despot, where you can everything you need for your home-war mongering project. This site is hilarious.

As if we can't tell when the person driving in front of us is obviously distracted by something, Cell phone driving style now officially recognized. Via metafilter.

Lately I have been wading through the Decameron, a collection of 100 stories by Boccaccio, written in 1350. Throughout the book the storytellers refer to "fickle Fortune" and "Fate, in his eternal whimsy" as a personage, or a god-like force that intervenes in our daily lives at his or her discretion. Not to tread on anyone's religious toes, but this story about a guy who wrecked his jeep and was thrown into telephone wires and saved strikes me as similar. He really believes "God" reached out his hand and delivered him into the safety of the electrical wires. I am, of course, happy that this fellow survived the experience, but it fascinates me how when the inexplicable occurs, we feel the need to assign responsibility. "God" has now replaced "Fate." Is there a difference? Is there any evidence that "God's" behavior is any different than "Fortune's"? An interesting inquiry certainly left to others better qualified than I.

While recreational mathematics ain't exactly my strong suit, I am fond of illusions.

Also on Metafilter.. This guy does some pretty interesting art. He takes images and arranges them so that they can only be viewed by looking at the composite reflected through a mirrored cylinder. It's not new - it was being done in the sixteenth century - but he's got a new twist. He does ... anamorphic photomosaics. Look at this.

Well it finally happened.

Speaking of Stereolab, can someone with a reasonably powerful computer please go here and download this mix and burn it for me. I would be eternally grateful. Unfortunately, my supercharged Mac went the way of eBay and now my credit cards are fewer but so are my tunes..

Very cool, but very sad. s t e r e o l a b web site plays music without words. Mary Hansen, you will be missed, my dear.

Need a friend somewhere in the world you've never been? How about Greece? Italy? Here at Holi-swaps, you register your house and coordinate travel-stay accomodations with people around the globe. Make friends, stay in foreign countries for free.

This is exceptionally interesting. The Newseum is now showing over 150 newspaper fronts every day in order to see how different papers cover the news. What did your paper do?

Alright, I'm here to tell you, Ring of Fire Hot Sauce is some damn good hot sauce. I bought Debbie a bottle of this when I was down in Key West, and we have since then quickly finished it off, adding it to just about everything we ate. In the absence of proper tortillas, I even resorted to topping saltines with the stuff once. Get ye some peppers.

Funny tidbits on the religious right at Holy Weblog!

Interesting article on chiasmus, a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two of parallel clauses is inverted in the other. Example: It's not the man in your life, it's the life in your man. This reverse structure has been used by great writers for centuries, especially James Joyce, one of my favorites.

Are you tired of seeing Calvin urinating on everything from Dale Earnhardt to Osama bin Laden? I am. Heck, I even saw one recently of Calvin peeing on the phrase "You." How incredibly stupid. Well, here's what Bill Waterson thinks about it all.

Oh great. The world's first truly artificial organism has been engineered by researchers in California. The bacterium makes an amino acid that no other organism uses to build proteins. The work is being hailed as "a very great accomplishment" and the technique promises to open unique avenues for manufacturing drugs. Check out the story here.

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934

"We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! I already knew that, in a way before I began to study systems. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people." A better reason to pick up kayaking I have yet to find. In this article, an excerpt for Donella Meadows' unfinished book on systems, she discusses what to do when systems resist change. You don't charge them head-on, you dance with them. Interesting stuff. Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity—our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality. Yes.

Ever wondered what recursiveness is? This is what recursiveness is. (via Mefi)

Fight for your right to copy music

Um, it's supposed to get down to "record lows" tonight. Can I stay at someone else's place? I'd hate to be here in my house when the water heater freezes solid and bursts, sending deadly shards of ice and steel flying through the walls. Maybe I'd get lucky and one would impale the pathetic window-unit heater I've got, which really cranks up the heat in here to a blistering 62 degrees F.. Anyone?

Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from the generous breasts to the gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves among the seasons and the years with a paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust - what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star-cluster? - Henry Miller

It's kind of stupid, but I want one.

Remember the ad with the kid giving "Mean" Joe Greene a coke? Or the Macintosh 1984 ad? This site has got the top twenty ad campaigns of all time. I'm ambivalent about this one: Should we celebrate ads? I usually can't stand them. Will we look back on our youth one day and say, "Do you remember that great pop-up on casino betting everybody used to get..?"

BlogSkins for you bloggers.

Oh my gosh it is cold. I know I am predisposed to sweat and 100-degree temperatures, being from Alabama, but my tolerance to the cold has disappeared completely. Of course, it could be that I’m here in my apartment, which is heated only by a 1950s-vintage space heater that I got from my grandmother years ago. When I start it up, the aged fan inside makes this horrible screeching sound like someone raping a harmonica. Eventually, the fan gets into a rhythm and starts blowing the heat out, creating a nice little two-foot by two-foot bubble of hot air. I’m sitting here trying to write my law school essay, and I can see my breath. My fingers are cold and numb and I can barely hold the ice-cold pen. I’m wearing four layers, one of which is a down jacket. When I walk from room to room, I’ve got to carry my pathetic little space heater with me and keep it right by my legs, which ends up making my calves extremely hot even though the rest of my body is almost frozen. Yesterday I put some deer meat out on my kitchen counter to thaw, and it didn’t. Once again, I had to use the space heater to warm the kitchen up in order to thaw the meat. What a weird season.

ho ho ha ha. From www.perspicuity.com

Well, after years of waiting, I'm finally ready to have a family of my own. So I found one on eBay.

Next time someone tells you to "go to hell", go here to find the nearest entrance.

I would post pictures from Key West but they all came out overexposed or something. From the pictures, it looks like we enjoyed a nice stay at the beach while in the midst of a horrible nuclear winter. Oh well. Next time, I'm going digital. (Sorry Debbie)

As I sit here in my study reading LSAT practice questions (the absurdity of which I will not go into) my window overlooks the row of houses going up 16th Avenue, and affords a nice view of Red Mountain and the blue sky above it. All morning it has been clear, with warm sunlight pouring through the room. But about a minute ago, a cloud crawled over the city and brought a cold breeze with it. It confirmed my suspicions that yes, I would rather be in Key West. On a cold day in the Keys, the air outside is as warm as the cup of tea I have steaming on my desk. To say the place exudes a deep calm would be a laughable understatement. My mom and dad wanted to get out of town with the family for the holidays this year, so we did just that, heading to the farthest point south that you can go in the continental United States. We had a blast, most of the time. Day 1: A Rerry, Rerry Christmas We left Montgomery on Christmas day, a little after lunch, and headed to Atlanta so we could catch an early flight to Miami on the 26th. Atlanta was bitterly cold when we got to our hotel, which was situated in the commercial wastelands surrounding Hartsfield International, and we were all hungry. Much to our chagrin, the surly hotel manager informed us that nothing was open on Christmas. Nothing? Surely not, we decided, and set off to find some grub. After a few stops and rerouting, we finally found Good Luck Chinese food, the only place beside Waffle House with a light on. We had been joking for an hour about ending up like Ralphie’s family in A Christmas Story (“fa ra ra ra ra, ra ra ra ra…”), and there we were, on Christmas night, ordering extra spicy Kung Pao shrimp from a funny Korean woman in a restaurant that qualified as a meat locker because she couldn’t afford to turn on the heater. It was ridiculous. But the woman was a good sport and served us up a box of good, hot Chinese food, insisting we were getting the gourmet stuff. “The cook is from New York,” she explained. So we headed back to the room and had a multicultural Christmas feast fit for, well, an emperor. It was darn good, too. Day 2: Hell Next morning we woke up earlier than the law allows and got to the airport, and boarded our plane without incident. Woo hoo, we were on our way! But no, it turns out one Mr. Murphy seems to have boarded the plane with us. Just after we had begun to taxi out to the runway, a pilot in the plane behind us noticed one of our engines had “a small leak.” This leak turned out to be jet fuel. Fortunately, we didn’t realize it at the time. All we knew was that we were going to miss our connecting flight in Miami if we didn’t get airborne soon. We rushed back into the airport and waited in line for two hours to get to the ticket counter, where we were put on a 8:00 p.m. connecting flight to Miami, and were lucky enough to snag the last seats on a connecting flight to Key West that was leaving … the next day. A whole day of the trip, down the drain. By this point we were all mildly irritated, but were hanging on. We ate a good airport lunch, and I found out that my picture was in Rolling Stone magazine (it’s in a photo of a drum circle at Bonnaroo. Dad was overjoyed. “At least they cut the picture off at the neck so no one can tell who it is,” he said). We then wandered to our new gate and began the process of waiting expectantly for our flight all over again. In other words, we slept in our seats, drooling on ourselves. Finally, after several hours it was time, and we were off. The flight to Miami was uneventful, thank god. We flew in at night, the bright lights of the city sandwiched between the vast darknesses of the Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean. I wanted to see Tubs and Crocket waiting in a Lambourghini at the airport, staking out a huge cocaine bust. (I was planning on yelling out, “Tubbs, this stuff is bunk!” when we arrived to see if any hardcore Miami Vice fan were with me, but I decided against it.) Once we arrived, we were given free hotel vouchers and went to get our luggage. Only to find that – you guessed it – it was lost. Murphy struck again. What’s worse, Caroline’s (my sister) bag had her medication in it, which she needed. After more scrambling and waiting in baggage claim lines we finally threw in the towel and headed to the hotel. We’d find the stupid baggage later. We took the shuttle to the Wynfrey Hotel only to find another long line of angry airline passengers at the checkout counter. We opted for the restaurant, where sustenance awaited us. And alcohol. Thinking our troubles behind us, we relished our overcooked, overexpensive dishes and left the restaurant with content bellies ready for a good night’s sleep. But not before the maitre d’ ran out of the restaurant and asked for dad’s meal vouchers … which he had already handed to him before we ordered. After a brief altercation, they let it go. Which was a wise decision. Very wise. So after dinner Jim and I took the shuttle back to the airport and got the baggage tickets, then headed to the Wynfrey bar for a drink. It had been a long day. We got to the bar, only to find … it was closed. That damn Murphy had beaten us there. But before I had a chance to declaim mightily against God and the forces of nature right there in the bar, the bartender had pity on us, and poured us some good scotch. Probably the best drink I’ve ever had in my life. Jim and I sat and laughed the day off, then went to our room and slept the sleep of the dead. Day 3: Redemption So, the next morning we all woke up refreshed and finally ready to make it to the Keys. Looking out of our hotel windows, we could see the blue expanse of ocean, could smell salt on the air. We ate a delicious breakfast downstairs and headed to the airport. By the time it took us to get to the ticket counter and retrieve Caroline’s bag, which had come in during the night, our flight to Key West was about to leave. That’s when Murphy caught up with us. With just minutes until our flight left, the airport security officials asked to check our bags. They loaded them upon a cart and wheeled them slowly through the airport, finally arriving at a room with several security people inside who were whooping and laughing. We thought they were having a party. Dad chuckled and pointed to a sign on the door – all it said was “No.” But we got our bags after a few minutes and scurried through the security check – having to take off our shoes to be checked in the process – and made it out onto the tarmac just in time. The plane was literally about to leave. But after a brief shuffling of people and baggage, we were seated and on our way. The 45-minute flight was fantastic. I could see the islands pass beneath us, the southern reef foaming with breakers, deep shades of blue and turquoise where the water deepened off the shore. We circled Key West and landed, and were greeted by the warm air. We rented our car, drove to the hotel and collapsed into our beds. We had arrived. For most of the rest of the trip, we managed to elude ol’ Murphy. He had nearly thwarted our attempts at rest and relaxation, but we got the better of him. We ate good food, enjoyed ourselves, and saw a lot of interesting things, despite the fact that every day more tourists were piling into Key West to celebrate New Years’ Eve. Day 4: We spent most of the day driving up Highway 1 visiting the other keys. We ate conch for lunch and visited Bahia Honda State Park, near where railroad magnate Henry Flagler built a series of bridges in the early 1900s. We drove to Marathon, and sat on the beach basking in the warm, well, December sunshine. The water was too cold to swim in. That night, we cruised Duval Street, which reminded me a lot of Bourbon Street in New Orleans, though with far fewer hookers, jazz and stumbling drunks. We even made it to famous Sloppy Joe’s, Hemingway’s old hangout during the early 30s. Day 5: A wonderful day. We got on a seaplane and flew to the Dry Tortugas. Discovered by Ponce de Leon in 1512, the Tortugas are a series of reef islands in between Florida and Cuba that serve as hatching grounds for sea turtles. Or they used to. During the civil war Federal Troops built Fort Jefferson there, a huge brick intended to protect Union ships who were blockading southern ports in the Gulf of Mexico. It was paradise on earth for us, but hell for the troops and prisoners stationed there. It was surrounded on all sides by gorgeous blue water, white beaches and crystal sunshine. We explored the fort, but weren’t allowed to snorkel because a crocodile had washed up on shore recently from the Everglades. The authorities figured he was blown hundreds of miles out into the sea by a storm. Damn that Murphy feller.. But the flight to and from was amazing. Just a couple hundred feet from the sea, we could see the islands, reefs, and shipwrecks in detail from above. I even saw some lone sea turtles, slowly making their way through the large waters. That night we attended the sunset celebration at Mallory square, where performance artists and magicians ply their worn trades to the throngs of oohing and aahing tourists. The sunset was an explosion of burnt colors, as if the sun were extinguishing itself in the ocean, sending massive multi-hued plumes of steam writhing hundreds of miles into the atmosphere. Day 6: Dad was feeling ill, so Mom, Jim, Caroline and I rented a boat and headed out to the reef for some snorkeling. It was bit windy and we all were soaked heading out. We arrived at the reef and Caroline, Jim and I jumped in. It wasn’t what I had envisioned (mainly from postcards, which it’s never like anyway), but for my first time snorkeling, it was great. We swam with barracuda, parrotfish and lots of others whose names I don’t know. It was still a bit windy and somewhat murky, but it gave us a glimpse of that wholly other world that moves just beneath the blue water. It was enough just to be there. We then drove to another island and walked around on the beach for a bit, then headed over to one of the boat wrecks we had seen from the seaplane. Jim and I snorkeled around it and saw some big fish lumber away as we approached. The boat was old and rusted, it’s hulking frame wedged in the white sand at the edge of the shallows. It has been there so long that two mangrove trees have taken root in the wreckage and flourished. It was haunting to swim under it and imagine what being on that boat for the last time must have been like. As we drove in we passed several more wrecks, the flotsam and jetsam of storms that periodically batter the Keys. We saw an abandoned dinghy, not six feet long, still tied to a rotting buoy. There was a helicopter resting on a small floating pier. Sailboats that had been around the world rested in the cove, their occupants indeed vagabonds and itinerants upon the world’s larger currents. I felt like raising a glass of rum with them. That afternoon we visited Hemingway’s House and saw the room he wrote such books as The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, and To Have and Have Not. A good history of his stay in the keys can be found here. It was a magical place. Day 7: Our final day. We did a whirlwind tour of the final sights we wanted to see, including Truman’s “Little White House” and the Mel Fisher Museum, a wonderful exhibit on the shipwreck of the Atocha, which was lost off of the Florida coast in 1622. Then we finally went to the “Shipwreck Historium” which I had been dying to see, and it turned out to be a hokey, sparse reproduction of the days of “wrecking,” or shipwreck salvage, when the Keys were first being populated. It was time we left. So after five glorious days among the sand and sunshine, we boarded the plane and headed home. We left Murphy on the beach.

Bush stimulates self with economic package

I always wondered where absinthe came from.

Hi, my name is McDowell. This guy is named Scott, and he's worn a nametag for the past two years -- just to see what peoples' reaction would be. Turns out he's had enough funny experiences to write a book. If you're a fan of the "commit random acts of kindness and beauty" genre, you might like this guy.

Once again, Ruben Bolling sheds light on the music industry:

Well, my posts have dropped off of late as I have been too busy, well, relaxing in the keys. The Crook family excursion to Key West was fantastic, barring only a brief period of hell when our flight to Miami was cancelled. The beaches were bright, the water crystal green and blue, the locals bizarre and friendly. I'll try and write more about it later when I'm not as busy. But the blog entries will be fewer as I am busy working on my new goal - getting into law school in the fall. I had been thinking of it for some time, but I reached a decision just before we left for Florida, and now its a go. I have quit my job and will soon be devoting my time exclusively (almost) to jumping through the enormous hoops to position myself for a competitive juris doctor. Wish me luck.

Happy new year errybody!