I’m entered to win a trip around the world…. Now children, get your minds out of the gutter it has nothing to do with sex.

I entered one of my photos in the lonely planet contest. No, I don’t expect to win. In fact it would confuse the hell out of me if I did. But it made me thing of the places I haven’t been that I would like to see.

Paris in August. –Avoid Paris in the spring time. Every asshole in France and every asshole tourist in the know world will be there. Room prices will be high, and everyone you do business with will be rude.

New Zealand, North and South islands, but only in the summer. I don’t ski and I don’t do cold if I can avoid it.

Australia. Ok it’s a big place. That’s kind of like saying I’d like to see Mexico. .. So I’d have to be selective, and I think I’d skip Sydney, it’s just another big city.

Tahiti and the pacific rim islands.

Northern Italy – Lake Como and that area.

Austria –some place besides Vienna.

More of New Mexico.

Parts of the Appalachian trail

None of these places are so exotic that they aren’t doable without winning any contest. I just have to decide I want to go back on the road.

I kind of like the rut I’m in so maybe I’ll watch some National Geographic special instead. I get the scenery, but I don’t get dysentery, bugs, bad water, visa hassles, cheap hotels and a lack of indoor plumbing.

Why was it I wanted to travel???

Here’s the photo in the mosaic.

I bet they chose thousands of photos, in fact they probably rebuilt their entire mosaic. For free no less, because it’s part of a contest to win a trip around the world. —-If I win….. See Ya!

Here’s the pic.

Zit popping

From Mikey’s blog.

Alma had a girl about 12:30

Somebody she knows has Santana tickets.

She gets to go and I have to hear all about it tomorrow. —Bitch

Karaoke is a major form of entertainment in some neighborhoods in the Philippines. In fact it’s fans are so enthusiastic that fights and stabbings over the way a song is rendered are fairly common.

NYT: By NORIMITSU ONISHI Published: February 6, 2010 – The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

Here in the states, a Seattle woman punched a man because she didn’t like the way he sang “Yellow.”

A friend of mine and I used to listen the Karaoke singers at a local bar and some of them were so bad that we would make fun of them but it was hardly worth getting in a fight over. –In the P.I.s on the other hand, an off duty policeman pulled his revolver when the people at the next table laughed at one of the singers. -I guess the cop was a big fan.

“The Philippines is a very violent society, so karaoke only triggers what already exists here when certain social rules are broken,” said Roland B. Tolentino, a pop culture expert at the University of the Philippines. But even he hedged, noting that the song’s “triumphalist” nature might contribute to the violence.

The lessons to be learned from this: Don’t hog the mic, if you can’t sing stay the hell away from the stage, and if you travel to the Philippines -a country with over a million illegal guns and a reputation for violence- Do Not sing Sinatra.