"Bo yo" is my new hero.

Muu

What??

Returning to the "real world".

I've just come back from a week-long vacation to an international (read: non-US) destination...



Aruba!

I adore this island so much. Despite the fact that I'm very much aware that there is year-round, international tourism very prevalent there, I was amazed to find tons and tons of Boston-based memorabilia in the gift shops. See here:



This was outside of a restaurant close to the resort at which The Boyfriend and I stayed. "...unofficial official home of Red Sox Nation" in Aruba? Now, onto the items up for purchase:






How hilarious is that? I lived in Boston for 5 years while going to college, and I'd been to Aruba three times before, but I've never seen such unexpected and... well... out-of-place Beantown love! Maybe it was the fact we were there around St. Patrick's Day.

What do you readers think is the reason for the Aruban love of Boston?

Chew on life's big questions.

Actor Rainn Wilson has created a pretty damn revolutionary site called Soul Pancake. It's a... forum... a place... a resource... to debate, discuss, and share views on religion, spirituality, faith, and other "big" things of the sort. (See the What is Soul Pancake? blog post he's made to clarify what this place is for.)

The most prominent feature of the site is the Question Collective - the place where members post photos that correspond with a deep (or as Rainn says, "big") question. Members respond to the question and can also debate with each other about the questions and the answers people give.

Being pretty antitheistic, I find Rainn's website very relieving! I think it's great to have a safe space to be able to speak your mind about a topic that is seen as somewhat taboo nowadays.

Rainn Wilson... you're awesome.

Speaking of the economy...

This is what $300.00 could get you in the 1980s:



The worst action scene of all time.

Thanks, Ze, for showing this to me.

Understanding the Credit Crisis

My buddy Transiit has posted this in his blog, and I just feel the need to share it. I think it's pretty awesome.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to financial stuff, and now I can actually grasp this messed up situation we're all in... yay?

DailyBooth

I recently got introduced to DailyBooth.com by some e-friends of mine after reading their tweets about it. I think its message is a really great one, as explained in their tour of the site. Here's the video about it:


Take the DailyBooth Tour. from jon on Vimeo.

Just a little promo of the site; nothing else really substantial to this post, sorry.

Can one actually measure miserable-ness?

About a week or so ago BusinessWeek posted an article about the unhappiest cities in the United States. The Editor's Note in the soon-to-be-mentioned photo slideshow explains how they actually quantify this miserable-ness:

BusinessWeek.com ranked 50 of the largest metros based on a variety of factors including depression rates, suicide rates, divorce rates, crime, unemployment, population loss, job loss, weather, and green space. The most heavily weighted factors were the depression, suicide, jobs (unemployment and job loss), and crime rates. The depression rate is based on survey and aggregated insurance reporting information at time of discharge, doctor's office visits, and insurance process filings. The suicide rate is for 2004 and comes from The 2007 Big Cities Health Inventory‚ compiled by the National Assembly of County & City Health Officials (NACCHO). The crime risk indexes for property and crime used for the scoring were based on FBI crime reporting for the seven most-recent available years. Divorce rates and 2009 population change come from the U.S. Census. The number of cloudy days came from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

So, let's see the top 20!

1. Portland, OR
   
2. St. Louis, MO
   
3. New Orleans, LA
   
4. Detroit, MI - I love how the photo used is of the General Motors buildings. I think that's a pretty good representation of its reasoning on the list, tee hee. (It does have the highest unemployment rate out of all of the others on the list.)
   
5. Cleveland, OH
   
6. Jacksonville, FL - Now, honestly, #2 in depression? How can one be depressed in Florida? The land of Mickey Mouse, oranges, and beaches galore!
   
7. Las Vegas, NV - I think this might be skewed. My sister lived in Las Vegas with her hubby and son for a few years. The residents themselves don't live on the strip or anything. I have a hunch that maybe their suicide rank being #1 could be due to the visitors and tourists who toss their kids' college savings onto a craps table.
   
8. Nashville-Davidson, TN
   
9. Cincinnati, OH - During 3 months last summer during part of my nomadic journey through life, I lived about 20 minutes outside of Cincinnati in northern Kentucky. I really liked Cincinnati!
   
10. Atlanta, GA
    
11. Milwaukee, WI
    
12. Sacramento, CA - This is the only CA city on the list. I've never been (though it's not too far from where I currently live) but from what I've heard, it is pretty miserable.
    
13. Kansas City, MO - I've been here for a few days for a conference about 3 years ago. Definitely an unhappy, depressing place; I can definitely say this from experience. I did not get a good first (and most likely last) impression from Missouri from this trip.
    
14. Pittsburgh, PA
    
15. Memphis, TN
    
16. Indianapolis, IN
    
17. Louisville, KY
    
18. Tuscon, AZ
    
19. Minneapolis, MN - My brother lives in the Minneapolis metro area. I didn't find it depressing, per say, but definitely one of the most unsafe cities I've been to. Even in the Mall of America I felt that it was too intense and definitely lacked security. It's totally got NYC beat in that sense.
    
20. Seattle, WA

So, have any of you been to these cities and want to weigh in on them? Do you agree or disagree with the list?

Craig is a dirty, dirty man.

CHICAGO (AP) -- Cook County's sheriff filed a lawsuit Thursday against Craigslist, saying the popular online classifieds site not only allows the solicitation of prostitution but has actively created "the largest source of prostitution in America."

Source: Full article on ap.org

This information just aired on the local news here in the San Francisco Bay area. (I'm in the East Bay myself. *waves hi to the locals*) I'm surprised that it's the largest source of sex-selling in the country (is that actually a quantifiable statistic?) but part of me knows I shouldn't be.

Even as soon as I click on the casual encounters section of the local SF Bay Craigslist (it was founded in SF, coincidentally) I'm brought to a list of things I should know and confirm I understand before I am "allowed" to enter. Hell, they even link to their resource of information about the exploitation of minors and terms of use. Exploring their Terms of Use, the only part of their terms that has the word "sex" in it at all is section 7 (entitled "Conduct"), specifically part b which states:

[You agree not to post, email, or otherwise make available Content...] that is pornographic or depicts a human being engaged in actual sexual conduct including but not limited to (i) sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex, or (ii) bestiality, or (iii) masturbation, or (iv) sadistic or masochistic abuse, or (v) lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person;

Hmm...

Note: None of the following links are safe for work! Well, there's this listing that definitely violates 7.b.i, this listing which voilates 7.b.iii and 7.b.v, and this one that, like the first one, violates 7.b.i. Good job monitoring this stuff, Craig!

My conclusion: there needs to be a new definition for the name Craig. Maybe someone can go on UrbanDictionary.com and define Craig as something more appropriate to the current situation. :)

To conclude this post, I found the following which has been defined as one of the all-time weirdest Craigslist ads:



I'll let you be the judge. If you think you can one-up it, please comment with a link or preferably a screencap!

Is this thing on?

I will attempt this whole public blog thing again. I swear it!