Somewhere Along The Way…

Because everyone else is doing it, I’m donning my dusty music reviewer’s hat and compiling my Top 10 Songs list of 2006…a task that was remarkably difficult once I started narrowing down the choices; I hadn’t realized until now just how many fantastic albums came out this year. This was definitely the Second Coming for […]

Reading this:
A Cremation in Kathmandu
…I have never been so shameless about crying in public, even if it’s in a quiet corner of a coffee shop with my laptop in front of my face.
This story is so beautifully written, and beautifully told - and this site is such the epitome of inspiration for me, in so […]

A recent American study has underscored the severity of the ozone loss in the Antarctic region - the protective atmospheric layer has been found to be depleted in excess of 90% in many places, and scientists have found “an almost complete absence of ozone” in certain air samples. This isn’t a particularly earthshattering discovery…I recall having the […]

So I managed to survive my first Christmas away from the eggnog-saturated comforts of home, after we got back from Mangawhai on the 24th - which was lovely, if not at all as warm as I was hoping/trying to make it seem in my pictures. It amazes me how quickly civilization evaporates once you leave […]

Well I’ll be damned. A freak weather pattern blew through the areas north of Auckland yesterday, covering Waikato and the Bay of Plenty in “hailstones the size of 10c coins” (!) - the first, and probably last, white Christmas that residents will ever see, even though it’s not technically Christmas yet. Though rain is plentiful […]

Michael Holmes, a skydiving instructor at the Great Lake Skydiving Centre in Taupo is…how shall I put this? one hella lucky motherfucker…after surviving a 4000 meter fall in which BOTH of his parachutes failed. The twenty-five year old - originally from the Channel Islands, where he became the youngest Briton to become certified in the […]

Just heard via Gothamist that Avalon - formerly Limelight, that “sacreligious” Episcopalian church-turned-nightclub on 6th Avenue - has been slated for conversion into a “mini-mall.” Apparently, the current landlord has decided he just doesn’t want to deal with the headaches of running the legendary club in a neighborhood which has come under increasingly stringent monitoring […]

Funny things happen to you when you’re drunk. Particularly when you’re drunk off a bottle of expense-account wine, sitting at work after a department lunch at a posh restaurant in Newmarket. And especially when there’s a summer rain outside, your shoes are wet, the air is thick and clammy, and there’s a Christmas tree in […]

Bungee jumping pioneer and legend AJ Hackett (a New Zealander who “invented” the sport after seeing natives on Pentecost Island in the New Hebrides flinging themselves off cliff faces with vines tied to their ankles - seemed like a good idea eh??) has broken his previous Guinness World Record by leaping off a building in the […]

Donning my left-wing tinfoil conspiracy theory hat for a minute…the NYTimes ran an article today about an 11th grade social studies teacher in an American public school, involving allegations which wouldn’t have been that surprising had it come from somewhere in the Midwest or South (no offense to readers from those regions, but you know […]