Apparently Greek real estate developers take a somewhat aggressive approach to the free market.

More than 60 dead. $1.5 billion in damage. Freakin’ Olympia damn near went up.

Not that the Olympia should be particularly important to, y’know, Greek real estate values. It’s only a World Heritage Site and all.

Sometimes you watch the news and just feel helpless and horrified.  (OK, most of the time.)  Visiting Greece was one of the most wonderful trips of my life. My friend Leslie and I went to the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and we couldn’t have been more both impressed by not just  the genuine friendliness of our hosts, but their surprising (and widely unanticipated) organization and efficiency.  Which, given this last week, seems not to have lasted much past the closing ceremonies.

Olympia itself was an incredible place.  (So was everywhere else we went.)  Even the ancient stone finish line is still there.

(Come on, I had to. Wouldn’t you?)

And I was only there for a couple of weeks.  Imagine living your whole life like this, among some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, and then seeing half the place threatened with destruction.

I cannot imagine what ordinary Greeks must be feeling right now. 

Apparently Greek real estate developers take a somewhat aggressive approach to the free market.

More than 60 dead. $1.5 billion in damage. Freakin’ Olympia damn near went up.

Not that the Olympia should be particularly important to, y’know, Greek real estate values. It’s only a World Heritage Site and all.

Sometimes you watch the news and just feel helpless and horrified.  (OK, most of the time.)  Visiting Greece was one of the most wonderful trips of my life. My friend Leslie and I went to the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and we couldn’t have been more both impressed by not just  the genuine friendliness of our hosts, but their surprising (and widely unanticipated) organization and efficiency.  Which, given this last week, seems not to have lasted much past the closing ceremonies.

Olympia itself was an incredible place.  (So was everywhere else we went.)  Even the ancient stone finish line is still there.

(Come on, I had to. Wouldn’t you?)

And I was only there for a couple of weeks.  Imagine living your whole life like this, among some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, and then seeing half the place threatened with destruction.

I cannot imagine what ordinary Greeks must be feeling right now. 

They’re this site’s two millionth visitor:

And they win… well, nothing, really. But a hearty hej anyway.

Two million visits in like four years is nothing, actually. Kos gets that every four or five days, I think. But you go to web with the site you have.

Btw, the level of detail stored about visitors weirds me out. Grabbing OS and browser info makes sense, since it helps designers optimize appearance and stuff. But SiteMeter just extracts the wee tip of the iceberg. Webmaster Colin knows way more than I do, but suffice it to say that as we watch the web, the web watches us. Many hosts store a slew of surprisingly detailed info on their servers, whether or not the sites use it or alert you or whatever. Just how things are.

But for all its shortcomings, the Intertubes also make the whole world more accessible. So finding our overnight Malmite brought back some nice memories. The bridge to Copenhagen at sunset, for example.

Mysig dag! Thanks for dropping in. And 1,999,999 thanks for the other visits, too.

Hey, Tom Tomorrow just YouTubed an old This Modern World cartoon, created back in the early go-go (until-crash-crash) days of the Interweb.

I started doing the voice of Sparky shortly after Tom and I met in person for the first time. He’d done my old radio show on several occasions, but it wasn’t until we hung out face-to-face while covering the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia that he thought I sounded exactly like a mildly pissed-off left-wing penguin.

The fact that I took this as a high compliment tells you a lot about where my head was at back then.

Anywho, it’s a little dated, but not badly. We clearly had no sense of just how much more surreal the lunacy in Washington would soon become. Sigh.

PS As you see, the cartoons were produced by Flickerlab, who have gone on to become an excellent and successful commercial animation studio. We might cooking something fun for next year. More if/when it happens.

Hey, Tom Tomorrow just YouTubed an old This Modern World cartoon, created back in the early go-go (until-crash-crash) days of the Interweb.

I started doing the voice of Sparky shortly after Tom and I met in person for the first time. He’d done my old radio show on several occasions, but it wasn’t until we hung out face-to-face while covering the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia that he thought I sounded exactly like a mildly pissed-off left-wing penguin.

The fact that I took this as a high compliment tells you a lot about where my head was at back then.

Anywho, it’s a little dated, but not badly. We clearly had no sense of just how much more surreal the lunacy in Washington would soon become. Sigh.

PS As you see, the cartoons were produced by Flickerlab, who have gone on to become an excellent and successful commercial animation studio. We might cooking something fun for next year. More if/when it happens.