Epic Photo: Crater Lake

I know the Pacific Northwest has plenty of dangerous volcanoes but when you have scenery like this at Crater Lake, it's pretty worth it isn't it?

(Learn more about Crater Lake here.)

Epic Video: Why do venomous animals live in warm climates?

I'm thrilled I live in the Northwest, where the most dangerous animal is a cougar or bear which usually hides out in the woods, as opposed to the tropics where there are countless nasty things hanging around. I mean other than when we hike, we don't have to worry about baddies unless Sasquatch decides to stop by Starbucks (it does happen in Starbucks).

And, surprise  there's a reason venomous animals hang around warmer areas as opposed to the mild, Pacific Northwest...



(To learn more about venomous snakes, check this book out)

Your guide to becoming an NHL fan

I had to put the NHL standings in the newspaper's stat section last night for the first time because, you know, the league has been on strike for months. Having grown up loving sports, hockey has been a weird black hole for me - a sport that I just haven't been able to get into. I'm assuming that you just have to Canada-ize yourself in order to get the full effect of puck fever. So here are a few things you should get youself if you want to become a hockey fan...

1. A mullet - I've been to Spokane Chiefs games, I know what kind of crowd they attract. If you want to fit in, you've got to have a mullet. If you still want to be employable... maybe just get a wig instead.

2. A Canadian flag - This should be flown proudly every time you pour maple syrup on your breakfast. Which better include some sort of bacon.

3. An NHL video game - What better way to get into the great sport than to play it against people online and call them terrible names. That's what every red-blooded North American adult should do, as long as they pepper in regular fits of anger and accusations that the other player is somehow cheating with some online hack code.

4. Creepy NHL voodoo dolls - I mean what better way to celebrate the sport then to have a small doll of your favorite player, right? I mean that's not weird or anything... wait why are you putting pins and needles in that doll?

5. Car flag - Because everyone that sees you sporting this flag will say "hey that person is really cool and they have their priorities straight!" and "boy you know what I really like, someone shoving their sports fandom in my face!" ... so please look like a convoy of hockey awesome with these car flags.

6. NHL Apron - Everytime you're cooking bacon, make sure you have the proper gear on.

7. Slap Shot - Apparently you're not a hockey fan unless you've seen this movie. Just be aware of the slightly softcore porn scenes in this film...

Don't Expect the NHL in Seattle Anytime Soon

Remember that league that plays hockey? With the talk of the new downtown arena in Seattle, there was the possibility that  Seattle could also get an NHL team. Much like how the Kings look destined to be relocated, the Emerald City could also swallow up some wayward hockey franchise. It doesn't look like it's going to happen, however, and you can blame the Canadians.

SEATTLE – Snagging the troubled Phoenix Coyotes hockey franchise for Seattle won’t be the empty-net goal some have suggested.

A deal to keep the Coyotes in Glendale, Ariz., fell apart last week when prospective buyer Greg Jamison failed to secure financing in time to meet a Jan. 31 deadline. Jamison has vowed to continue pursuit of the franchise, but is expected to meet considerable opposition from a newly elected Glendale mayor and town council that has already spoken out against the favorable conditions attached to the previous deal.

Seattle would definitely be a top candidate for a relocation of the Coyotes, but as things currently stand, Quebec City appears a more viable destination, given the speedy time frame involved. For one thing, Quebec already served as home to a National Hockey League franchise with the Nordiques from 1979-80 through the 1994-95 season and has broken ground on a $400 million arena.

Let me spell this out to you, Quebec City, which already has a strong NHL base, has already started building a stadium. Sorry Seattle, you're a bit behind in the time table. But lets be honest, did we really want a team that would stop play every four years because of a strike?

Hiking Mt. Si

On Saturday I headed up Mt. Si in North Bend, WA. It was a foggy, drizzly day at my house, but it was the exact opposite at Mt. Si. It honestly felt like a nice spring day. Sure the summit was cold from the wind, but in the treeline it was warm and sunny.

(Here's a book featuring 100 Classic Hikes in Washington)

And here's some of the pictures I got of the views:


A panoramic shot from the summit. Mt. Rainier is in the distance and Seattle is somewhere in the fog below.



View of I-90 and Mt. Rainier.



The Olympic Mountains.

Failing infrastructure in America? At the Super Bowl?

The Super Bowl is like a second Christmas for most Americans and perhaps the greatest holiday of them all. Everybody comes over, eats a lot of food and watches football. It's like Thanksgiving but without those pesky family members.

(Buy DVDs of all the Super Bowls, here)

On America's greatest day, however, the power went out. In the third quarter things went dark in the Super Dome and it took over a half hour to resume the game. Slightly embarrassing for the city of New Orleans which has had plenty of heartbreak in the past with Hurricane Katrina (even in this very stadium). They redid the Super Dome after the Hurricane but apparently the root cause of the power outage was that the infrastructure of the stadium couldn't handle the demand.

"Shortly after the beginning of the second half of the Super Bowl in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, a piece of equipment that is designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system. Once the issue was detected, the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome in order to isolate the issue. Backup generators kicked in immediately as designed."

It's a rather vague explanation, but the very issue is infrastructure. Neither the power company nor the stadium operators could see the problem and avoid it. America's power grid is rather, shall we say, weak, and this just highlights it. You always here in those IBM commercials about all the smart grids and this is what they're talking about. A similar incident happened during at Sun Life Stadium at the Orange Bowl, but since it was a smart system, the operators were able to bypass the issue and avoid all the lights going out in the stadium.

The sad part is, the Super Dome got a new electrical system after the Hurricane, meaning that this should have been prevented. There should had been no problem with the lights. However, minutes of the stadium's governing board show that twice the issue of redoing some of the electrical work in the stadium to make it the power system 100 percent redundant. They still weren't enough.

The implication is obvious: the state agency that oversees the Superdome knew over the summer that the stadium's infrastructure—just seven years old—wasn't sufficient to host a Super Bowl. Whatever additional work was done wasn't enough to keep the lights from going out. (LSED's "preliminary review" finds that the upgrades weren't the cause of the blackout.)

So let me just pull thoughts together in a tight bow. Our aging infrastructure in this country gave us a stadium that needed a new electrical system, and the governing board knew the system couldn't handle the new load but still couldn't get it up to par of the big game. Lets say this is a bridge, the state would have known the bridge couldn't have handled the load, put a few wooden planks on it and it still collapsed.

I know this was a new system but it still failed. Infrastructure failure. Get use to it because its going to happen a lot in the near future in this country. The 49ers had a game delayed last year when a transformer blew on national television and plunged the stadium into darkness. If we can't simply keep the lights on during the biggest football game money-maker of the year, what about our roadways? Our sewage systems? Our drinking water?

Ron Swanson is the MAN!

Anyone who is anyone will tell you that the manliest man out there is of course Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec. He's a man among men.

(Catch up on all the Parks and Rec seasons here)

Here are some of my favorite Ron Swanson quotes:

• “I have been developing the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness for years. It’s a perfectly calibrated recipe for maximum personal achievement. Categories include: Capitalism, God’s way of determining who is smart, and who is poor. Crying, acceptable at funerals and the Grand Canyon. Rage. Poise. Property rights. Fish, for sport only, not for meat. Fish meat is practically a vegetable.”

• “I am submitting this menu from a Pawnee institution, J.J.’s Diner. Home of the world’s best breakfast dish: The Four Horsemeals of the Eggporkalypse.”

•  “You may have thought you heard me say I wanted a lot of bacon and eggs, but what I said was: Give me all the bacon and eggs you have.”

•  "I got my first job when I was nine. Working at the sheet metal factory. In two weeks I was running the floor. Child labor laws are ruining this county!"

•  "I have cried twice in my life. Once when I was seven and I was hit by a school bus. And then again when I heard that Li’l Sebastian had passed."

 (Buy some Parks and Rec gear here)

Or, if you just want a good time, visit DrunkRonSwanson.com. Warning you might start dancing!

Epic Photo of Greatness: Looks like its Prom time

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

Wolverines are back in Washington

X-men heroes aside, since the 1930s Wolverines were basically extinct in the state of Washington. They've recently been making a comeback, however, and reclaiming their range in the Cascades from the Canadian Border to Mt. Rainier. At least according to the Seattle Times.

(If you're looking for Wolverine from the X-men, here you go.)

There are an estimated 25 wolverines in the state of Washington that just aren't visiting from Canada but living here for good. About 250 to 300 are estimated to live in the entire lower 48 states.

And these things are just like the superhero. No joke.

“They are the superheroes of the animal world,” said Shawn Sartorius, a wildlife biologist based in Helena, Montana, for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “When you follow the tracks of these things, you see they are not taking the easy way around; they will go straight over mountain tops, craggy peaks, the rockiest, steepiest, cliffiest place; they will go right over that in the middle of winter, at night.”

They're also rather temperamental...

And wolverine are ferocious. “When you see one in a live trap you never forget it,” Rohrer said. “They are growling, trying to bluff you, they are not cowering in the corner, if you crack open the lid they are charging and coming up to the front, snapping their jaws and drooling. They put on quite a show.” 

Luckily, unlike the controversial presence of wolves, wolverines don't quite present the same kind of danger/people going crazy about their reintroduction.

But hikers have nothing to worry about: Wolverines are primarily carnivorous scavengers, feasting on a wide variety of foods, including carrion of every type, usually elk and deer. But they will also take live small mammals, including pikas, marmots, ground squirrels, porcupines and snowshoe hares. They will sometimes devour bugs, berries, eggs and roots.

(If you want to learn more about wolverines, buy this book.)

Turkey tries to take over IDAHO

People are up in arms about a recent development involving the state Idaho and a foreign country. Apparently a Turkey company is literally trying to own Idaho. Uh-oh.

BOISE – An ag group in Turkey has applied to the Turkish Patent Institute to trademark the word “IDAHO” for its agricultural, plant and animal products – and the Idaho Potato Commission doesn’t take too kindly to that idea.

Neither did the Senate Agriculture Committee, which this morning not only introduced a resolution proposed by the Potato Commission, but put it on a fast track to the full Senate, which is scheduled to suspend its rules and take up the measure this morning.

“If that office grants them that authority to use IDAHO as their trademark, they can both sell and market products both in Turkey and internationally using the Idaho name,” said Sen. Steve Bair, R-Blackfoot, Senate Ag chairman. “I guess we take exception to that. This is not intended to poke our finger into Turkey’s eye, but they need to understand that we treasure the Idaho name.” If others can use it on their products, he said, “We lose the ability to regulate the quality of Idaho’s products.”

Uh oh, you mean that "Idaho Potato" might not actually be from Idaho but rather Turkey? The horror. Because that's exactly what I am thinking when I am chowing down on french fries.

Americans Believe God Has Decided Outcome in Sports

Heading into the Super Bowl we've been getting plenty of heapings of god from former charged-with-murder man Ray Lewis. Naturally he's now also been tied to performance enhancing drugs which he calls a "trick of the devil" or something like that. I would hope that most American sports fans can waddle through all the god talk by athletes that live a lifestyle that is anything but Christian.

But since sports is essentially entertainment for the masses... it doesn't mean their fans are considerably bright either. Over a quarter of American sports fans believe that god has helped decide the outcome of a sporting event, meaning god apparently loves steroid users?

Perhaps the most shocking is that 27 percent of those polled—more than a quarter—believe that "God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event." Watch a game with three of your buddies. Odds are that one of you wholeheartedly believes that God has a vested interest in the outcome of the game, and will influence it to get His way. This could really throw off Vegas's lines. ... There's variation across respondents. Minority Christians and white Evangelicals, as well as Southerners, are the most likely to believe God cares about sporting events and athletes; the religiously unaffiliated, and people from the West and the Northeast, are the least likely to agree.

(sigh) At least we're part of the godless masses up here in the Northwest. If you think for a second that the supreme creator of this universe - that's so large that light is just now getting to Earth from 14.5 billion light years across the galaxy - cares about a little football game, you're delusional.

Another part of the survey said that 53 percent believed that god rewarded athletes that had good faith. I'm curious to find out if these are the same good faith athletes that get caught with prostitutes a week before the Super Bowl.

(Or maybe the true Christian athletes don't go out to clubs, get drunk, get a baby mama, get shot, get into drugs, get into trouble with the team and then the league. A natural cause and effect?)

I'm pretty sure God is doing a facepalm right about now, or just every time Ray Lewis speaks.

Epic Photo of Greatness: San Francisco

It may be the winter months, but that doesn't really apply in California. Here's a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco in the background. 

Taco Bell pulled an ad that mocked vegetables

Taco Bell has dropped the gloves for their latest ad, going all in to make fun of vegetables. Considering they've probably added to the country's obesity problem by leaps and bounds, it seems rather counter-productive to be making fun of healthy food.

But then again, Taco Bell does continue to come up menu items that cause instant heart attacks.

The attack on vegetables, however, has drawn some criticism and the fast food chain has pulled their ad. 

NEW YORK -- Taco Bell is pulling a TV ad after receiving complaints that it discouraged people from eating vegetables.

The ad by the fast-food chain was touting its variety 12-pack of tacos, with a voiceover saying that bringing a vegetable tray to a party is "like punting on fourth and one." It said that people secretly hate guests who bring vegetables to parties.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a health advocacy group, this weekend urged people to tweet their complaints about the ad and the chain quickly made the decision to pull it.

But just wait until next week when they release the World's Largest Burrito or something like that.

Epic Video: In Russia, tank drive you!

A lot of Russians have dashboard cams in their car because apparently their police are corrupt and their insurance companies are shady. It's good for us in the ol' US, however, because now we get these crazy YouTube clips of what life is like in the former USSR. For example, a tank rolling across the highway...

 

Still a better experience than driving in Spokane...

Tom Brady's house has a moat, so you can feel bad about yourself right now

Tom Brady probably is worth 100s of millions of dollars if you consider how much he's paid, combined with endorsements and throw in perhaps a smart investment here or there.

So you'd expect this kind of thing right? His $20 million California home has a moat. Yeah that's right, A MOAT.

Among the many features in its 22,000 square feet are a resort-style pool, massive play area for children and a common medieval fortification system.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll have to re-examine my life where I live in a one-bedroom house with a lean-to attached to it for the washer and dryer...

Leaked Seattle Sounders 2013 kits

The MLS season is just about here and the MLS still hasn't released the new designs for many of the teams. However, today a photo was leaked that perhaps shows the Seattle Sounders FC 2013 kits.

What do you think of the Sounders 2013 kits?

I think these are HUGE step up from the stupid bra strap kits of the last two seasons. But I like the solid green kits. I think the green and black should be switched on this design. Thoughts? Leave a comment!

Miami-Dade County is paying billions for their new ballpark

People complain about government spending, right? How half of the country is on food stamps and sucking the other half down because they refuse to work, right? Costs need to be cut! Local governments need to stop giving these handouts that only help lazy people!

Then you read a story like this and realize that the needy might be the cause of the problem, it might be the rich people. Public financed stadiums are the biggest farce in all of sports. We pay billionaires to build these palaces designed to charge us more money so we can go watch our favorite baseball team play. The public doesn't get the money back, it goes back to the rich owners. Owners that worth billions of dollars themselves.

Now Miami is on the hook for BILLIONS of dollars for their new ballpark. That's right, they are going to have to pay back billions of dollars so people can go to a privately owned ballteam's game. Good lord.

FROM DEADSPIN:

The county chipped in $500 million for the construction of Marlins Park. The county did not have $500 million, but construction needed to start and be paid for immediately. So Miami-Dade borrowed the money by selling bonds on Wall Street, a loan which won't come due for decades.

When it does, it's going to hurt. The Miami Herald does the math on just one set of those bonds, which raised $91 million. Payments begin in 2026, and quickly skyrocket. By 2048, when the last payment is due, the total reaches $1.18 billion.
....

this $1.2 billion is only on one set of bonds. The total payments for all of the $500 million borrowed by the county will eventually come in at a whopping $2.4 billion. Not only did Jeffrey Loria get taxpayers to buy him a stadium, but they bought him the most expensive stadium ever built.

One thing I noticed is that they'll be paying in 2048. Anybody think that the stadium will still be around by that time? The owner will probably be clamoring for a new state-of-the-art ballpark that actual pickpockets fans as they walk through the concourse far before the date.

Now since it was voted that the county had to build the stadium, they had to find the money somewhere because they just didn't have that kind of cash laying around. Apparently we're more concerned about our cool new stadiums then the local government actually serving some public good.

(If you want to waste money, buy this Marlins hat.)

New Orleans Pelicans logo

 The New Orleans Hornets have been rumored to be changing their name to the Pelicans for a while now. Today their new logo was unveiled.

Here's the video that leaked. It's actually pretty interesting.

Here are the official logos from the Pelicans new site. And if you're a fan you can buy some gear there too.

Personally I think the logo is pretty cool. I don't really care for the colors but I guess they have meaning to the city.
Blue, gold and red are the colors of the city flag of New Orleans. But I don't think they are a very great combo. We'll have to see what they uniforms look like.