Today has been experimental drinking day. Sure, I drank a sixer of Pacifico and then some, but I also had some crazy Venezuelan anise rum made in the Andes (a gift; drinkable, but not the greatest), and tried a truly horrendous Mexican “beer additive” which pretty much makes your beer taste as if it was mixed 50/50 with soy sauce. Yack. Anyway, some pictures:
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| Thanks to my friend Marcos Pessoa in Brazil for this picture… no, I'm pretty sure that's not the knife he used to do the leg chopping! |
Japan is like the king of guerrilla nudism I think. |
My friend Bastard in Russia goes skinny dipping near St. Petersburg… You have to admit that the photo on the right is just begging for a giggly caption photo. |
Other than that, I have a variety of car projects on the go that I haven't mentioned before. I have bids in to become the Mexican dealer for two high speed amphibious sports cars, and in addition, I have offers in to cast molds off the two Adams Brothers designed cars below to bring them back into production.
It's quite likely that none of these projects will come to fruition, but hey, if you don't bite the fishhook, you'll never find out how good looking the fisherman is. Or something like that.
We all went over to Isla Espiritu Santo again today to go snorkeling. After about half an hour, Saira and Rachel were back in the boat relaxing but Michael and I were still in the water. The sea lions had been pretty reclusive and weren't in the water with us like last time, although they sure were hollering like crazy from their sunspots on the shore.
As we got a little close to the shore for his liking (lots of pups had just been born in the last month), the big dude — the king of the island — in the picture above started really freaking out, barking and truly getting agitated. I turned to Michael and said something along the lines of
“you know, I'm feeling kind of freaked out right now” and we booked it back to the boat as quickly as we could swim. At that moment the bull jumped off of his perch and started rushing toward us.
As it turns out, accelerating our pace toward the shore was probably the wrong call, because it meant that we ended up intersecting his path, since he can swim about seven times as far as us clumsy humans, aquatic ape or not. I think both of us just about had a heart attack as this grizzly bear sized sea lion passed about three feet underneath us. A moment later he was back up on the shore sunning himself, with a smug grin on his face as he watched us scamper back into our ponga boat.
Oh, and even though we were in a modest pango, it was yacht day or something out on Espiritu Santo as we passed a half dozen mega yachts. As you know, a sailboat is one of my dream estates, but Rachel is more of an oil sheik like character and expects to travel under power — I told her that dollar-for-dollar a power yacht kind of sucks in comparison to a sailboat when it comes to trans-oceanic crossing. She told me that this was the boat she expects me to buy her for her birthday and it was perfectly capable of any crossing I could throw at it.
I'm good at what I do and make a good living, but I think Rachel has overestimated my earning potential!
My Manta Montage is running a 5 speed Porsche transmission, but while the transmission is in decent shape, it's basically impossible to get it to shift. As you can see below, like most standards, shifting is controlled by a rod that rotates (which corresponds to pushing the shift lever left and right) and goes in and out (which correspons to pushing the shift lever forward and backward).
Problem is, there's a little too much play in the system, as well the ranges of movement not being quite right, so the transmission is difficult to get into gear, let alone shift while driving… So I think I'm going to have to disassemble the whole thing and rebuild it from scratch…
Other than that, I have the computer that will be running
BMEvideo set up with the custom management sofware and processing submissions (although it's very slow)… the problem now is going to be figuring out how I can upload massive amounts of data from here in La Paz…
So Tommy Thompson , former Health Secretary under President Bush, is pushing a plan to put ID chips in US citizens, and Bush has committed $125 million in the 2006 budget for pilot programs. John Procter of VeriSign, the company working with Thompson and the President on the program says, “virtually everyone could benefit from having a chip inserted,” and points out that in addition to the chip's benefits as ID for medical purposes, it can be used to secure financial transactions.
I've written before about how there is a disturbing undercurrent of Christian neo-cons that have the hubris to think that they could play a role in bringing about the rapture (more, more). The theory they have is that by “forcing” the events in Revelations to play out, they can hasten the second coming of Jesus. Sadly, I kid you not. Keep the above in mind when you read Revelations 13:16-17:
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Anyway… I was briefly at the beach today. When I got there a wirey looking kid, maybe 25 or so, was sitting at one of the bars and shouted out that he liked my tattoos, and started rolling up his sleeve to show me a small patch on his shoulder. “I was in the Marines,” he told me.
“Must be nice to be down here in Mexico instead of over in Iraq,” I replied.
“I killed six hundred and thirty six people over there. Got shot nine times and was legally dead for twenty two minutes.”
“That seems like a lot.”
“It sure is nice to hear people speaking English again,” he tells me. “I'm in the Secret Service these days — I shouldn't be telling you this, but do you want to see something cool?”
“Sure,” I say, as he pulls out his wallet and opens it a little. I can see inside it there's a large stack of hand laminated cards of some sort. He pulls one out. It's some kind of homemade ID with his picture on it and some writing. He flips it over and in big block letters it says something like “BRITISH MI-6 AGENT” — it becomes clear that he's either kidding or a crazy person. He looks at me as if I should be extremely impressed, and I'm not really sure how to reply, but he changes the subject anyway.
“So, do you do tattoos?”
“No, but I run an online tattoo magazine.”
He asks for the URL, and I give it to him, and then head off to sit by the water. Maybe he's even reading this note right now? If you are, drop me an email and tell me your real story.
I wanted to share a few photos of a friend of mine from Venice, Italy, that does facial saline injections. There are more (and bigger) pictures in today's BME/extreme update, but here are a couple each of him injecting 20cc of saline into both his tongue and his lips.
Please don't flood me with
“why” type questions — like many things I post here, it's really one of those
“if you've got to ask, you're not going to understand the answer anyway” sort of issues.
