The Adventures of Curious George

I get the best messages from my friends. "Heya, I'm assuming you missed your flight but got put on another and just have no way to communicate until you're here. Hope you arrive today, I should be in all day and if I'm not I'll leave instructions for you at the front door. Monday I have to leave around 10am but will again leave instructions and some of my roommates might be around to open. Hope you make it and are not in fact in jail or China. Best! - LD" Really I just had a 17-and-a-half hour layover in Newark. I arrived "on time," just a day or so later than he expected. The concern was nice, though! Thanks, Luis! During said layover, I took the PATH and public bus ($3.25, rather than $15 for the express bus) over to New York City, relaxed (napped) in cafe chairs and parks, walked around the city, caught the most recent Harry Potter flick (the 3d made it marginally better, but wasn't anything amazing), found a bag (very small) of marijuana u...

Things I am doing these days: Helping kate and jack build some stairs Setting up for the Fire Circus at the Crucible Signing and sending patent application forms for a company in San Diego where I sometimes work Packing for my hitchhiking gathering trip to Portland Preparing for my Eastern European wedding/festival/hitch-gathering trip in 9 days Installing, to varying degrees of success, Neverwinter Nights and its expansions on my laptop natively in Linux (and in the process learning much more about linux) Fixing up the motorcycle (spokes repaired!) And welding up a rack (almost done... hopefully i can finish it next time I'm in the bay area... next week?) Posting location details on the hitchgathering website in a sensible manner so that last-minute people can get there? Posting same on CouchSurfing and maybe digihitch...

While I was reading about the Black Panthers , someone from Freakonomics Radio called to schedule an interview with Stephen Dubner to talk about hitchhiking and why it's not around any more. Life is very strange these days. ----- No real time for context except that I was wondering about whether wunderground.com (the Weather Underground website) had anything to do with the Weather Underground leftist group responsible for bombings, among other things, in an effort to stop the Vietnam War, among other US Government violence. Cue Wikipedia. That page got me curious about the Weather Underground and their actions in the 60s and 70s, since my history classes either didn't mention them or glossed over them in the face of more important stuff like said Vietnam War. Anyway, buried in the Weather Underground wikipedia page was a link to the Black Panthers, which, considering I'm now staying in a neighborhood where original members lived, I figured I might want to know more abou...