Chewing gum magnates: they're just like us!

My blog posts are getting too long. Even I realize it. Who has the time, these days? In the interests of appealing to the youth market, I will attempt to make my blog more like US Weekly - lots of photographs and brief anecdotes. Here I present photos of me that are of general interest because I was in places that I recommend that others go to: Catalina and Long Beach. Both were fun!

The off-season is starting soon in Catalina and you can stay in places with beautiful views, as well as showers that have seen better days and whose unfortunate design may momentarily flummox you, for like $60 dollars a night. We recommend the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel, once the getaway home of Mr. Zane Grey, noted Western author and apparently the scourge of Catalina Island, or at least the scourge of the Wrigleys (of the gum and the field) who basically owned Catalina back in the day.

This is a picture of the monument to Mr. Wrigley built by his wife... apparently he was supposed to be buried here but things didn't work out? Regardless, it was fun to hike up to, and there was a nice garden with endemic plants below it. I always get endemics and pandemics confused: pandemics are bad, endemics are good. I took some pictures of endemic cacti, but they are much more boring in picture form than they were in real life. In real life unusual cacti are very interesting, but on the internets pictures of unusual cacti rank right up there with pictures of other people taking pictures. I just did a flickr search for boring to see if there was some more boring type of picture than that, and I realized two things: those flickr pictures aren't boring at all, and I'm really bad at taking pictures. Here is one that Adrian took:


That is me in Long Beach carefully petting a zebra shark using only two fingers, which I don't totally understand the naming of because it looks a lot more like a leopard to me. Long Beach is also fun! Especially around the aquarium. It is also where you catch the boat to Catalina, so you can make a half-day of it. We can also recommend the Root Beer Float Icees sold outside the aquarium.