It's time to wish a Happy Birthday to Big Gay Jim!
Crossing the Atlantic
If you think buggying naked is crazy, check this out...
An adventurer by the name of Dom Mee set sail Tuesday from St. John, Nova Scotia in an attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a 14 foot boat powered by a kite. The trip is expected to take anywhere from 30 to 75 days.Read a brief newspaper article about it here.
The vessel, "Little Murka", is equipped with a satellite telephone, e-mail access, a water purifier, and a 60-day supply of food. Mee also has an iPod filled with songs so he can "chill out to his tunes." Should the boat go off-course while Mee is sleeping, an anchor attached to a water parachute will shoot into the ocean and keep the vessel in place.
The coolest thing about this is that Mee is maintaining a blog while at sea. You can see his daily posts here and GPS location here. 
Sunday's Addiction
If you don't already check Post Secret every week, you should. It updates on Sundays.
Story Time
All of us have at some point had to "come out" about something to our family and friends. Whether it was your orientation, religious beliefs, political views, or that you don't like lima beans, it is probably a story worth telling. So go to the Flock Forum and tell it to us. Now. No, not after you read your webcomics and check your Email - NOW!
While you're there, check out the other topics or start a few of your own. These conversations can help keep our collective friendships going strong, regardless of where life takes us all after graduation.
What's that? Not a member of the Forum yet! Why the hell not? Click here to register.
Toss Me a Cold One
Nothing refreshes like the blood of a martyr...
(NOT photoshopped - taken on 8/20/05 in front of an actual church in Denver)
Origins of AoxomoxoA
"...a sort of perfection in life, a moment of purity..."
- Dean Jordan
My post entitled AoxomoxoA generated a lot of questions from friends and readers all over the blogiverse, so I went looking for better answers than I had. Here's what I found...
On June 20th, 1969, the Grateful Dead released a studio album entitled "AoxomoxoA". The liner notes say it "derives from the palindromic preoccupations of Rick Griffin, the brilliant artist who designed the cover art." Rumors abound regarding its meaning. One theory is that it is from a Pre-Columbian Central or South American language, possibly Mayan, or Aztec. Another holds that Griffin created the word for a comic he drew years earlier - it was the response of an alien surfer to a human surfer who yelled "Cowabunga!" How Griffin came upon it may never be known; he died in a 1991 motorcycle accident.
It is a superbly constructed palindrome, as it not only reads the same forward and backwards, but each letter is also reversible (i.e. an A, O, M, or X still reads the same after you flip them over). Thus, AoxomoxoA is readable from left or right, even if you are looking at it from the back.
Using the Pythagorean method of numerology (the most common method in the West), the nine letters are valued as 166646661, which, when added together is (not surprisingly) 42...
At any rate, the album has received critical acclaim as has Griffin's art, but I was curious about how this term came into kiting jargon. It turns out that Dean Jordan, one of the early pioneers of sport kiting was a fan of Griffin, and he saw the term in the aforementioned surfing comic. He adopted it as his model when he started making kites professionally. Jordan wrote on rec.kites, "we are an aoxomoxoa centered company, each kite has some aoxo built into it, and I always sign some form of aoxo somewhere on anything I do."
Now you know...
Photographic example of AoxomoxoA by Rachel (also my new desktop wallpaper)
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