5 out of 7 continents recommend this blog

I try not to take too many things personally especially when it comes to my writing. Yeah it is great when somebody ‘gets it’ but honestly half the time after I finish a paragraph, I don’t understand what I just wrote so it is unrealistic to expect ‘outsiders’ to willingly decipher my insanity.

Now like any ‘blah blah blogger’ wanna-be, I have tried to keep up with some general statistics to analyze reader growth, where and what types of posts are most popular, and how long folks stick around to read and stomach my tripe. After 4 months of exhaustive research and literally thousands of data points, I can honestly tell you that I have learned ‘NOTHING’, except that South Americans and the occupants of Antarctica HATE ME?

Hey I am not being over-sensitive here and I know I don’t have mirror site for the Monoblogs in the Spanish language or native Penguin. But you would think after closing in on my 5th month of posts, some ex-patriot drug dealer, retired in the Costa Rican jungle would have the decency to stop by and say ‘Buenos Dias’ Duuude? I even recently took a trip to the zoo to visit their “Penguin Cove” exhibit and have a stern ‘beak to beak’ with the ‘Emperor’ about this unacceptable penguin disrespect. Despite my generous offering of sardines, crackers, and krill, the zoo-keepers still refused to let me see the ‘King’ and marched him away. Can I help it that when unshaven and donning my dapper spotted jacket, I bear a strong resemblance to a fat leopard seal?

In any case, it is obvious that I have my bloggy work cut out for me. I am going to have to step it up a notch if I ever hope to be read (uh ok – maybe black n’ blue) on every continent. I believe there are well over a dozen species of Penguin in the world and untold dialects of Espanol. I could dominate the Antarctic demographic, If only I could get Batman to take care of those pesky ‘snow birds’ and Robin to lay on their eggs. Then South America is a sure-fire snap for satisfying stats, if I simply snag that ‘She Wolf’ Shakira, to seductively guest-blog - or at least ‘SHAKE’ up my readership a bit.

Kiss and Tell

On Saturday mornings, whenever we are free of commitments and the car’s tires are not frozen to the driveway, my wife and I find going to garage sales enjoyable entertainment. We rarely find anything of significance to purchase, but it is more the journey than the acquisition. This is just a time to decompress and nose around in other people’s private belongings and medicine cabinets EXCEPT while they’re watching.

Recently on one such expedition, my wife became thrilled to find a videotape for sale titled “08 min. LEGS”. As you can guess this is an intense but short exercise tape to focus on toning your legs. Given the leg warmers and fashion-forward choices of the fitness guru, the tapes were produced decades ago. But the exercise is truly only secondary – the real purpose of the purchase is to ‘complete our SET’.

“What?” How many legs do you have anyway – isn’t one tape enough? No, actually on previous garage sale outings over the last two or three years, my wife found and purchased BOTH “08 minute ABS” and “08 minute BUNS”. Now neither of us know how many other body parts are available for conditioning on these tapes, but at least for now our set consists of three.

I appreciate exercise but I particularly like it when OTHER people are doing it. Honestly, I know eight minutes is not much to ask to tone up so I have no REAL excuse. But part of me wants to blame the fitness industry since they are always trying to strengthen the same old hunks of meat. I mean where is the creativity and leading edge workouts for the rest of us who need attention in other areas of our bodies?

Consider the lips for one thing. I mean we speak with these things and kiss stuff every day of the week (Depending on how much you are brow-beaten by your boss). You would think those pink sphincters might be one of the first things body image experts would focus on for ‘perfection’? On second thought, nobody practices pursing more than smokers, and after years of ‘reps’ they start to get those little ‘pucker-puss’ lines that radiate out from the mouth. SEE, that’s the problem with exercise, you just shouldn’t over-do it. Nobody wants to wake up after years of working your abdominals to see a giant vortex of pucker-lines emanating from your belly button?

You know what it REALLY is, despite their reputation, fitness fanatics are just too lazy to create a lip workout routine that focuses on toning a dozen major muscles in your face. Just like those hunky personal trainers that apparently lack sebaceous glands, lip muscles all have fancy Latin names and NEVER SWEAT! I think I see a Hollywood opportunity here – ‘Angelina’s 08 minute Lips’! Better still, in a few years, yet ANOTHER garage sale workout video will be available to add to my wife’s set!

When my "Thumb Drives" Wobble!

I have always had a fascination with earthquakes and geology even as a young lad. I lived in California over half of my life so I have personally experienced more than a few first-hand brushes with the relentless power that can be unleashed by nature. The interesting thing however, is only with the advent of the computer revolution and the rapid decline in cost of solid state storage and memory can ‘non geo-geeks’ actually start to grasp the true massive nature of recent quakes.

While Haiti’s earthquake was a powerful jolt, the problems there were exacerbated due to decades old poverty and largely unsuccessful governance. I could not tell for sure from a distance, but it appeared the damage was made worse with unreinforced concrete and poor construction, in addition to population density in Port Au Prince. Reports are that between 200,000 and 300,000 people died in the Haiti quake – a staggering number. The effective yield of the energy expended in this event would be equivalent to around a 32 megaton TNT explosion. That is about twice as much energy California’s Northridge earthquake in 1994 and about 1/30th the size of the devastating San Francisco quake of 1906.

Though adequate for a low resolution pictures, it probably has been some time since you associated a large capacity thumb drive with 30 megabytes, but a couple of years ago it was state of the art. Haiti, as bad as it was , in terms of energy dissipation is like a 30 Meg. thumb drive and the San Francisco quake of 1906 would be around the equivalency of a 1 Gigabyte SD card – still fairly small by modern computer portable storage standards.

Now fast forward to Concepcion, Chile and their massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake this week. A death toll has yet to be determined but no doubt even with all of Chile’s experience with earthquake preparedness and strict building standards, thousands will still perish. The effective TNT yield of this event would equate to the explosive power of approximately 16 gigatons. This gut-punch was so massive that the EARTH showed measurable “wobble” on its axis as two tectonic plates fought to occupy the same chunk of real estate 22 miles under ground. So back to our computer example, this would be equivalent to a 16 gig SDHC portable storage card – respectable by any standard, but hard to imagine that a seismic event of this size is literally capable of “Earth-shaking” the globe.

Even beyond Elvis, it was back in 1960 that another 'big shake' was felt in Chile and around the world. A modern record of a 9.5 magnitude or 178 gigaton yield quake was recorded that was an incredible 530 times more powerful than the power of the Nagasaki atomic bomb (32 kilotons). Even with our bloated, feature rich operating systems, most of the world’s computers, can function adequately with a 178 gigabyte hard drive on board.

Oddly I suddenly feel the need to run out to Micro Center and buy a 1 Terrabyte hard disk for my computer? Let's hope the earth never feels the urge to unleash a magnitude 10 (1 Terraton yield yet unrecorded by man)seismic event. Just thinking about that terrifyingly raw explosive power makes my knees, head, and yes even my Frisco-quake sized THUMB drives start to REALLY wobble!