DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Just north of Vancouver is the city’s “Natural Wonder,” a 100-year-old “engineering marvel” called Capilano Suspension Bridge. It’s a major tourist attraction.

We didn’t go, because wherever the major tourists were, we wanted to be somewhere else. Our host in Vancouver turned us on to a similar suspension bridge attraction in Lynn Canyon, which would provide these significant advantages:

1. fewer tourists
2. free admission
3. shorter span
4. less height

Yes, I considered it an advantage that the Lynn Canyon bridge is both shorter and less high than the Capilano. I really don’t need to be suspended in the middle of a 450-foot (137m) span, 230 feet (70m) above a river. The Lynn Canyon bridge is less grand, at 164 feet (50m) high and 157 feet (48m) across, but that’s already enough to give me the willies when I lean over the side to take a picture.

These things move, you know.

The Capilano Bridge site boasts that it receives 800,000 visitors every year. Figure the tours get rained out 25% of the time; that means they’re pusing 2900 people a day across the bridge. And through the gift shop.

But wait, it gets worse. The current Capilano Suspension Bridge is the “fourth bridge at this location.” What the hell happened to the first three? Is there evidence of wreckage 230 feet below?!

Anyway, the Lynn Canyon bridge has an appeal of its own, even for thrill-seekers. Following is a virtual menu of ways to get injured or dead at Lynn Canyon, as presented by a three-piece billboard at the entrance to the park. First, some general warnings are presented…

“When your friends ask you to do something dangerous, don’t bend to peer pressure.”

… and then the signs recount stories of past park visitors falling, maiming themselves, and sometimes drowning…

“Severe impact with water after a high jump: force of impact tore running shoes apart and drove shoes up the legs of jumper. Jumper sustained back injuries - 1970.”

“Failure to clear protruding outcrops at 30 Foot Pool. Victim suffered broken leg and gash on thigh - 1980.”

“In 1991 a hiker was trapped in this position for 5 days. The force of the water was so great that he had to be pulled away from the canyon wall by a team of rescuers and commercial divers with ropes and pulleys. He slipped and fell from a log while traversing the canyon. He had been drinking.”

It’s always true that if you climb on rocks near a body of water, you risk falling to your death. But only at Lynn Canyon will you see an artist’s rendering of it.

I’ve been seeing what appears to be spider traffic from Axmo.com in my server logs… dozens of hits per day to various URLs on my site, with http://axmo.com in the HTTP_REFERER field. These aren’t clickthroughs; the IP is the same in every case (82.164.174.188; it doesn’t resolve). I thought it might be “referer spam,” but there’s just too much traffic. I’ve never seen a referer-spammer this aggressive.

I visited the advertised site and found what appears to be a search engine. Google has raised the bar so high it would take something pretty fantastic to make me bother trying a competing product. At a glance, Axmo didn’t have it.

Then I noticed the “pear-2-pear” typo on the URL submission page, and then this surprising description of the company’s technology:

Axmo is the first SE that makes full use of Microsoft’s new file system WinFS that will be implemented in the new OS, LongHorn.

And I thought, that seems like a really expensive way to build a search engine that can’t scale.

But I was momentarily intrigued, so I tried the search: I typed in a word, clicked the submit button… and got a .NET server error! Classic!

Ironically, the full error message suggested I check my spelling. Hmmm.

I dreamt last night that John Kerry selected me as his running mate.

Of course, I woke up screaming.

I’ve been playing drums since high school. I’ve studied rock, latin, jazz, rock, parade, rock, blues, progressive rock, and rock styles. Oh, and rock, and also let’s not forget rock.

Anyway the one thing I never learned was how to smile when I play. It’s like my face just doesn’t go that way any more.

Maybe I can blame my days in the marching band, when we were encouraged to don a rigid “game face,” even though my game face was indistinguishable from my “gas pain face.” Maybe that’s a story for another time.

I watch Carter Beauford with amazement. His joy in playing is evident on his face. Watch his instructional video or a DMB concert; he wears a grin half the size of his enormous drumkit.

I think this must be something he studied. It requires five-way independence: the left foot is playing eighths or quarters or something fancy on the hi-hat, and the right is going ballistic (but tastefully so) on the kick drum; the right hand is zinging out some amazing ride pattern across two cymbals and the left chatters ghost notes like the entire Blue Devils snare line at triple pianissamo. And the rest of the brain is thinking “smile nice for the camera!” But I’ve never seen such an exercise in the tutorial columns of the drumming magazines.

(Don’t even tell me that Beauford chews gum at the same time. I know this. The man has two brains.)

The closest I can come to smiling is a sort of baleful grimace. I try not to aim that at anyone else on stage, lest they stop playing in alarm. What happened, is the building on fire?! I tried a few times at rehearsal tonight, with extremely limited success. Maybe this is why my bandmates rarely look at me when I play; they’re afraid what they might see.

Inkjet ink: $8000/gallon