Toast for Brekkie

Flickr Mashups

I am flickr fan. Freak. Fanatic. You may well have guessed this given the fact that even if I'm not bloggin', I'm still flickrin'. And as if I didn't spend enough time on that site already (or takin' pictures, just ask anyone who's spent more than five minutes with me and Tyrone), I've just discovered, thanks to google and wired, the ten best flickr mashups. It's been over an hour and I'm only on the first two, the second of which I used to create this one-day-belated message for everyone's favorite blog momma:

Check 'em out kids. If you're already a flickrer, this will blow you away. If not, welcome to the fold.

From the planet Ludd

As you've no doubt surmised, I've been suffering from writer's sloth as of late. That is, I have not been at a loss for experience, accident or drama, rather I have been loath to write of it. In an effort to breach the dam of thoughts and raise the siege on my words, I offer a token, a trifle, a small anecdote that I hope will set off a reaction and gather speed like a snowball down a mountain.

Yesterday I received one of the funniest texts Tyrone has ever seen. I laughed until I cried. My coworkers gophered over to see what all the ruckus was about. And much to your privilege, I garnered permission from the parties involved to relate it.

It started with a text message from my Dad. Over the weekend in Savannah, I taught my mother how to Sudoku. It was only last year that she learned to text, so I assumed she had passed the knowledge of the fruit of good and bad texting along to Dad in the spirit of learning new things. But no. It was mother texting me from father's phone.

What makes this even funnier is that Delara and I had spent the better part of the weekend investigating the wholly unique manner in which my mother's brain works. She's constantly asserting that she has no clue from whence her children's mental faculties arose; she claims daily (and errantly) to be unintelligent, much like the humble but untrue declarations of my father. We finally settled on the idea that at any given moment she has several streams of consciousness flowing inside her head; it's just that her knack for taking the link between brain and voice and jumpering it rapidly from one stream to another is unparalleled.

It's like moving a mug randomly from left to right under seven simultaneously flowing taps. She's the black and tan of pundits. Without a pause to breathe, she can utter two phrases so seemingly unrelated it makes your own thought process screech to a halt. But the truth of the matter is that her brain simply moves light years faster than her genteel Southern mouth can. Any cavil we expressed as to the logical progress of her ideas could be dismissed, it simply took a few seconds to express the interim train of thought. Needless to say, our mirth in her presence was neverending, as the apparent non sequiturs flowed like bathtub gin from Prohibition-era barrels.

But the story! The tale! After I realized that it was Mom on Dad's cell, I joked, "Wow, texting from Dad's phone! I almost had a heart attack thinking you'd finally dragged the luddite into the 21st century."

Now, given the background on Mom's brain and Dad's burgeoning technical savvy (along with an awareness of my affinity for science fiction), I'll hope you'll find the following, rendered verbatim, as humorous as I did.

"Dad wants to know what a luttite is. i told him it was from Star wars."

He's done it!

I thought it was sort of strange when Global Flyer's path took a sharp right turn outside of London. I along with millions had been tracking Steve Fossett's progress on his latest adventure live on the Virgin website over the past three days.

At first I figured he was making a flyby of some special location. Then I thought he might be adding length to the journey for the record books. The major news outlets haven't caught up with it yet (though by the time you read this they most certainly will have) but it looks like he's safely on the ground, not at his original destination of Kent, England, but in Bournemouth, a resort town on the southern coast, overlooking the English Channel.

The newswire on the mission status page says he issued a mayday due to a generator failure, having lost electrical power. Instead of ditching, he found his way to Bournemouth International Airport (google map it; there's good resolution) to land, but burst two tires on landing! Wow. What an exciting ending to a long and arduous voyage.

I'll update later today when the dust settles, and include a couple photos of my own from the start of Steve's round-the-world-and-then-some jaunt. Stay tuned!