Cleveland Day 3

Hi folks,

I've got to make some adjustments to some of the pictures I took at the zoo today, so I won't be able to post them all up, but I'll be sure to put some up that are okay as they are. In a lot of cases, the zoo is not lit very well, and you don't want to use a flash on the animals (and some are under water) so I'm going to some light photo-editing to touch'em up and get them ready to be online.

Things I noticed about Cleveland

There is nobody there. There aren't people in the streets, they aren't on the sidewalks, they aren't anywhere. I don't think I even noticed apartment buildings - there just weren't people around. It was a very quiet town with nobody in it.

Notice this empty street. This is what the city was
like all weekend. The absolutely only thing that you saw on
the streets were red lights.

But there were some very nice avenues that we were able to effortlessly walk down, like this charming little spot.

Pretty neat street, eh? It had its charm, and little shops
all along it. No pedestrians or cars, but there were shops!

Here's a neat picture of the city, too. Again, not a car or pedestrian in sight.

Going to the zoo, zoo, zoo

The zoo was pretty neat, but it was missing some things that we were hoping to see, including elephants, cassowaries and giant tortoises. But there were plenty of neat things, including some of the stuff I've added below.

Here's a neat alligator - it was a miniature type of alligator.

Here are some monkeys. One is a proctologist, as you can see.

... and a bald eagle.

I'll be sure to add some more pictures tomorrow. I hope you've enjoyed our updates over the last few days.

Cleveland Day 2.01

Well, it's Sunday morning, my fiance's birthday - and we're about to head out to the zoo. But we've got to get dressed, showered, packed and checked out before we do that.

Yesterday was pretty cool, though. Here's what it looked like:

Started the day off sleeping in real well, and then looking for somewhere to eat. We wound up at a place across the street from Progressive (Jacob's) Field, called Local Heroes (not pictured). Then, we went and found our seats in the ball park.

Progressive Field was neat - the bullpens are both in the right field, though.
There's some great standing room in the back, too.

The Jays had a good game, and Roy Halladay was awesome - although I don't know if he got the win for the game or not. The Jays have been pretty good over the last few games, and to evidence how well they've been doing, I made sure to take a snapshot of their battling lineup, which also shows their batting averages.

Look at those batting averages! Hard to beat a team with
a lineup like that. Granted, it didn't finish looking like that.

The Jays were doing awesome all game until BJ Ryan came in, loaded the bases on mostly walks, and then let a guy score a three RBI double in the bottom of the ninth! Not good relief work. Luckily, the Jays had a four-run lead, and were able to bring in another closer to finish the job that BJ f-ed up.

Now, the weather in the sun was wonderful, and I even got some sun in my cheeks. But the weather in the shade was like 35 fahrenheit. It was cold! At times I could see my breath, and was thankful that the Indians were giving away free scarves to people who came to the game.

Also, I think I've discovered the solution to the American Auto Industries problems. Just slap this logo on the car, and every American will buy one.

Seriously, I saw more The North Face jackets than
I did Indians gear. If The North Face was a sports franchise,
it'd be grossing more than the Maple Leafs, Man U and the
Yankees put together. People LOVE The North Face - so
much that it makes me suspicious.

I plan to make a jack exactly the same called, The South Face. My slogan: Yes, I know you have a North Face jacket, hell, everyone does. But do you have a South Face jacket? A zillion dollars later (by only next year) and I will then sell the company and tell everyone that I made the jackets out of something horrible, like vellum, or something.

There are many more things to relate about our trip yesterday, but I'm getting the stink eye to pack my things up and get out of the hotel room so we can get to the zoo.

I'll post more (may be tonight?) with more pictures about our trip.

talk to you all soon,

Cleveland Day 2

We're getting ready for baseball today - making sure that we've got warm coats. Yesterday there was a four hour rain delay, which I truly hope won't interfere with our baseball game. The Jays beat up on the Indians (who have had a lot of struggles - they'll have those kinks worked out of their lineup before too long - because they just seemed to be unprepared to compete at the professional level).



Anyhow, the cool part of our trip this morning is complimentary coffee in our room from Wolfgang Puck. Puck is a famous, celebrity award-winning chef with nine restaurants, three national awards, and has been on six shows as himself.

So when Puck decides to put his name on something, you can probably know that however it tastes, that's exactly what it's supposed to taste like.

So the coffee? It isn't bitter, it isn't strong, it's pretty smooth, it doesn't need sugar or anything else. It was very nice.

- - -

After that, we're going to go out and find something to eat, take a shuttle to Progressive Field, watch the game, eat some ball-park pretzels and then find somewhere to celebrate the post-game festivities. I'll be back to post up some pictures soon.

And the weather? Well, it's forecast to be: 41 degrees, feeling like only 32. I don't know anything about Fahrenheit, regrettably. Probably means that it's cold, though. I think we want to have it around 65 degrees. So a high of 44, but sunny, which is better than rainy.

Anyhow, we'll be back in a few hours, and we'll have some more details for you then.

Cleveland Day 1

Hi folks - from Cleveland, Ohio.

The entire car ride down, the only thing that was going through my mind was this song:



And I don't know any of the lyrics, only the part that goes "Ohio" so - I have been stuck with it for a long while trying to figure out what it was. I was somehow convinced that it was a Stevie Nicks song - when of course I should have guessed that it was more Neil Young genius. Its political message, lasting power, and sardonic melody are unmistakably Young.

Anyhow, entering Ohio is always a pleasure because the Michigan interstate routes are less well funded than the Ohio interstate routes - meaning the ride gets smooth and comfy as soon as you cross the state line. It's beautiful.

Our trip started out around 9:30 this morning, and despite some obnoxious detours in Detroit, everything went very smoothly. The trip was alright - and we rolled into the Cleveland Museum of Natural History with no trouble. It was our first stop in the city.

First - Dr. Michael Ryan from "Paleoblog" was indeed out of town in Korea at a conference, like he said he would be. I asked to meet him anyhow, just in case his trip was cancelled. It would have been neat for the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum to meet with us.

While the presentation isn't the most impressive we've ever seen,
that doesn't mean that a big faceoff between a Tyrannosaurus and a
Triceratops isn't cool.

The dinosaur exhibit at the museum was a little out of date - it looks like it was installed some time in the mid-80s and there hasn't been a lot of money to update the exhibits, and that's unfortunate. I think some shag carpet might have been the icing on the cake, actually.

Turkey vulture in an outhouse.

There was an absolutely awesome live exhibit out back of the museum, with deer, falcons, eagles, vultures, raccoons, an otter, foxes, hares, and bobcats. That was a real highlight of the visit. My fiance and I were absorbed with the raccoons as they played and scrapped with each other.

He's playing with a rock. He played with it a lot.

Our hotel room is great - the bed is enormous and comfortable - and I napped in it almost immediately. Another great note is that Quantum Leap was on tv here. Cool.

Our tix for the Jay's game tomorrow should be great - third baseline in the lower bowl - should be awesome. The Jays were rain-delayed this afternoon for the opening day; so maybe we'll get a double-header tomorrow afternoon? Hard to say. Should be a lot of fun, anyways. First ball game of the season!

Who is George Belcourt?

That's the new question of the day - and I've got to figure it out. I don't suspect that he's going to be found Online, unfortunately. He's an oldster, from Lower Canada in the early 1800s, meaning he's likely not the most popular subject for people to be blogging about - or posting information about on the Internet.

That does mean that I'll get a neat chance to head back into the library, search through some Microfiche, and see what I can learn about the good ol' days, the Maritimes and Manitoba.

What's so special about this guy that I will be writing a period-piece on him? Chiefly, he was legally ejected from the Red River Valley (Louis Riel, anybody?) and sent to Rustico, PEI, where he founded Canada's first credit union (so I'm told) called the Farmers' Bank of Rustico (1864). He must have lent a few dollars to the fathers of confederation, you'd think. That's kind of neat.

I wonder what he was doing the day of Confederation? I wonder, back in those days, how long it took for the word to spread that Upper and Lower Canada, and a few colonies in the Maritimes, were now confederated under the jurisdiction of a new land?

The crux of this article, however, will be the unique quality of him driving the first steam-powered vehicle on PEI. I believe I heard that he had the device imported from Europe somewhere - although I can't be sure.

So this was the first man to drive a car in Canada. That's what makes his story so interesting, and may give me a chance to get published in Beaver Magazine. It will definitely be fun to watch this article unfold. I haven't done any archival research for an article in almost four years - it'll be nice to get back into the books, taking notes and wiping my eyes when I take my glasses off in the archives of the Leddy Library.

Wish me luck.

Q: What's over 100 million years old and is still cool?

A: Yeah, dinosaurs.

Some people think that being a paleontologist is easy, and all you have to be is a total pussy, like Ross Gellar - but in fact, paleontologists are tough bad-asses like Indiana Jones (except they don't fight Nazis, Stalinists and Aliens). Although a paleontologist could probably take out the Red Army if he had to. They're always out in the 'Stans digging stuff up - so they're like international spies crossing dangerous borders in intense areas around the world. They see more commie action than the average man, that's for sure. More than Ross Gellar, anyhow.

[Not a paleontologist.]

Do you think finding dinosaur bones is safe? Well, it's not, and you could go to jail for it, like Nathan Murphy, who made headlines around the world in 2001 after he excavated a 77 million-year-old mummified duckbill dinosaur - later named Leonardo - that turned out to be one of the best-preserved fossils found. Apparently he's being charged with stealing fossils (which means he excavated a fossil on property that he didn't have permission to excavate from).

The fossil in question has been nicnamed Sid Vicious. That's how real paleontologists think - Gellar would have named the fossil Bette Midler, like an idiot.

When I was in Chicago, IL I saw a presentation by the former curator of the Royal Ontario Museum about his trip to Kazakhstan, where they last entire months in the badlands of the middle-east (or Asia, or whatever continent Kazakhstan is in - it's kinda in the middle of everything, isn't it?).

Months with rationed water, food rations, intense weather conditions, and the laborous task of smashing through rocks to excavate shattered fossils and teeth - all so that you can take them back (via muthufucking helecopters, yo!) so you can study these bones for years and years, trying to figure out what the hell they mean.

[Triceracopter - People who design helicopters wish they were paleontologists.]

Ross Gellar can't even decide what the colour of his f-ing shirt is (and it was pink) let alone decipher the complex clues that dinosaur bones and fossils leave behind. If a paleontologist wears pink (which they sometimes do) at least they've got monstrously awesome beards, sunglasses and a plaid pair of socks to compensate.

That shirt might be pink, but it doesn't matter - this paleontologist is bad-ass! He's like a lumberjack / witch doctor. Awesome.

That is Robert Bakker - bad-ass paleontolgist. He climbs rock cliffs and uses TNT every year to blow the shit out of whatever stands between him and fossils (namely, rock - but he could probably blow up a Soviet spy, right?)

Jack Horner sticks in his thumb and pulls out a ... whatever the hell he's looking for. This guy read through a few books and realized that all predators these days are like hamsters compared to dinosaurs - so he flipped the biosphere the bird and started studying the greatest predators and carnivors the world has ever created. That's awesome.

When paleontologists, like Jack Horner, finish with these holes, they can drop in elopers who interfere with their bizness and backfill that shit. That's right, you don't tresspass on a paleontologist, because they just don't give a fuck about anything but dinosaurs. If you haven't been dead for over 70 millions years, they haven't got the time of day for you. Conversely, if you asked Ross Gellar what time it was, he'd stutter the exact time to you, and then ask if there was anything else he could do for you! That's not what paleontologists do!

Paleontologists tell the time of day from the position of the sun! And there are only two times of day to a paleontologists - daytime or night time. They work while the sun is up, then they rest, waiting for daybreak, when they start working again. Gregarious, unlike Gellar. Ross would be late for work, like a dick.

In conclusion, if I were to guess whether Michael Bay was a paleontologist or a Ross Gellar, I'd have to go with a Ross Gellar; why? Because he's decided that his Tranformers 2 movie doesn't need the Dinobots! WTF? The reasoning is: “We couldn’t quite figure out how to justify a robot that would pretend to be a dinosaur.”

EVERYONE would pretend to be a dinosaur if they could pull it off! Transformers just don't know about them yet, or else they'd be disguising themselves as tyrannosaurs, stegosaurs, ceratopsians, pteradactyls, and sauropods in no time. Guaranteed, a transformer would have his mind blown if he saw a dinosaurs. It'd be awesome.

Zombie stegosaurus

So, now that I've done some photoshopping on the bad-boy, I can present the finished Stegosaurus Zombie for your consideration:

I also managed to layout the storyboards for the next few chapters of the Choose your own adventure, although I don't know when I'll get that done. It's already 111 pages, or something like that, which is pretty big considering I'm only halfway through the story. I guess when you're writing all those alternative choices, that's when things start to get much longer. This could be quite the long project.

I hope you like the image - it was a long time coming.