Vagabonding : 2009 March |

Asteroid hit earth in Sudan

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Photo by AP

Smart people that don’t blog for a living have been saying that it would happen for a long time, and it actually did!

The first asteroid ever tracked from deep space on a direct course with earth actually broke apart and smacked down in hundreds of pieces all over a desert in Sudan back in October of last year. The pieces were recently recovered in Sudan and are being studied.

The good news? We’re still alive, I think. Lucky for us, the asteroid was only about the size of a car (hopefully a European car and not an American size) and broke apart. Per the BBC, the pieces still hit with the force of 2000 pounds of TNT.

Also lucky for us that the entire thing fell into an uninhabited desert and not somewhere like say….New York City? There aren’t a whole lot of places on earth that you can detonate 2000 pounds of TNT without making a lot of people very unhappy!

The interesting thing to me is that unless you’re a big nerd like I am, or belong to a local astronomy club - you probably didn’t even know anything about this thing possibly heading for your living room. What happened to the Hollywood Armageddon solution of grabbing a few rednecks off of an oil well and training them to blow it up?

For starters, there was only about a 19 hour notice between spotting this thing and it scaring the hell out of some tribesmen. That’s not enough time to find a guy like Bruce Willis let alone evacuate an area.

A home astronomer first spotted the asteroid and the funny thing is that the computer which processes space objects near earth rejected his data - because it didn’t compute. The system wasn’t used to tracking things so close and so intended on hitting earth!

Luckily we have until 2012 to move our cities underground and train deep space drilling teams, so there is plenty of time. Thank goodness for the Mayan’s calendar, otherwise I would probably be working on my 401K rather than putting stamps into my passport.

Posted in Ramblings |

Wild Rover

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In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day (and for lack of time to write something meaningful) I’ve decided to post the lyrics to my absolute, all-time, mouth watering favorite Irish pub song - The Wild Rover.

The Wild Rover was written in the early 1800’s and has become the staple go-to song when a traditional band needs to get people pounding their empty pint glasses on the table in chorus. It instantly boosts the craic and the positive chi in a room by 200% and floods memories of Ireland through my brain.

[If you're in Cork, raise your Murphy's, otherwise raise your Guinness]

Here’s to a happy St. Patrick’s Day, getting back on the road, and playing the Wild Rover once more!

(Read more…)

Posted in Ramblings |

Remember Tibet!

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The 50th anniversary of Tibet’s uprising

The Dalai Lama speech

“A hell on earth”

That is the way the Dalai Lama described the Chinese occupation of his country during his speech this morning.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Tibet’s sad attempt at an uprising (yes, they actually had a military if you want to call it that) which resulted in the Dalai Lama fleeing to India - where he still lives today. He loves his country and the people love him beyond words, but sadly he may not live long enough to ever return home, at least if Hu JinTao and company have anything to say about it.

50 years ago today, literally hundreds of thousands of Tibetan people were slaughtered, their temples burned down, and their identities taken. This isn’t ancient history we are talking about - many survivors of the Chinese invasion are still around.

Unfortunately they probably won’t be telling their story any time soon. When I was traveling China in 2007 my website and even the entire WikiPedia were blocked by the Chinese National Firewall which controls all data, coming and going, on the internet into China.

As much as I loved my time in China studying Shaolin, learning Chinese, and wandering around the mountains of Yunnan, I still can’t shake the thought that I was frolicking with the enemy. Within my father’s lifetime, this same government has murdered nearly a million innocent people who posed no threat whatsoever. I wanted desperately to visit Tibet and was queued up for an entry permit in Chengdu when they had a skirmish in Lhasa, causing the government to stop issuing them for weeks.

No one seems to be too bothered. Hell, lets give them the Olympics even. They can’t seem to load the boats fast enough to get their junk to America and people line up to buy the products made cheap by misery and oppression. Sadly, most American’s couldn’t even point out Tibet on a map.

A few people did hear the speech this morning and there were some small protests outside of Chinese embassies in India and Australia even. Unfortunately for the Tibetan people, its not enough and tomorrow when they get out of bed, they are still being treated cruelly by an evil government with a history. Made all the more efficient thanks to the new railway from Beijing all the way to Tibet - now they can deliver Chinese capitalists and soldiers right to the front door of Lhasa.

Since I cannot lend a twitchy trigger-finger to Tibet, I will do what I can from here to support them. Every time I’m forced to buy cheap imported junk I grimace.

AVAAZ.org is one of a handful of organizations that try to raise money for Tibet awareness. I launched the rather unsuccessful www.peacebookings.com last year to try to raise money to donate to them for their efforts. Rather than typing in Hotels.com and big travel sites like Priceline.com, please go through my link to raise money.

I don’t hate the Chinese people - actually the opposite. I would like to officially throw their government the middle finger however. Go ahead, ban me and my website - I’ll be back.