City Museum

While recently in St. Louis on vacation, I had one of the coolest experiences. The City Museum! This place is part art, part playground and all fun. Seems like a large group of artists were set loose on this old abandoned shoe factory and went wild creating art from "found objects" (e.g. "junk") from in and around the city. The results are amazing. The highlight was MonstroCity, which is the outdoor playground consisting of old airplanes, a castle turret, and bunch of scaffolding that you climb through, with many tight squeezes and vertigo-inducing heights. You can see our pics at Flickr (and see all "citymuseum" tagged photos) and there are loads of cool pics on their website. Better yet, go and experience it for yourself!

You can read about the City Musuem at there website. There is also a very interesting feature in Wired magazine.

Photo in Post-Dispatch

We recently made a family trip to St. Louis (my hometown) and visited the Gateway Arch. While taking pictures outside, a photographer approached me and took this shot that ended up on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. We went two days after a recent outage that they experienced with their tram system (that takes you to the top). Everything is still running fine, but they had to shut down one side of the Arch tram system and it made big news. The photo at the left is the resulting picture you see me taking in the newspaper photo.

Wolf migration to Colorado

This is old news, but it was news to me. The Colorado Division of Wildlife believes they have evidence of wolf migration into Colorado. They even posted a video. It appears a male wolf may have crossed the border with Wyoming to possibly establish territory or to look for a mate. Of course, this doesn't really constitute a migration as he might of just crossed back over into Wyoming. But as the gray wolf population grows (estimates have 3,800 in the lower 48) and with the incredible range of these animals, such migrations could continue. Thankfully, any wolf in Colorado is currently protected under USFWS regulations as it is still listed as an endangered species. But western states (Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Colorado) are drafting their own management plans to handle wolves as they will become responsible if wolves are taken off the endangered species list. Currently, the de-listing of the wolf is expected to become a protracted legal battle.

I mentioned the incredible range of these animals. They can defend territory ranging from 50 to 1,000 square miles. For fun, I calculated the rough distance a wolf might have migrated if this sighting (north of Walden, CO) was a Yellowstone wolf (see Yahoo map - about 500 miles). The Colorado DOW found no tag or collar that would indicate it was a Yellowstone wolf and it is possible that it migrated from another state (Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Arizona all were part of a reintroduction program as well as Wyoming/Yellowstone). Still, it is sort of fun to imagine these animals traveling these distances.

You can read more about the gray wolf here:

• Gray Wolf - Colorado Division of Wildlife
• NRDC: Wildlife on the Brink - Gray Wolf (Rockies/Prairie)

Cycling and doping

Lance Armstong spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival about doping in cycling. He said something that I have told people for a long time. The reason that cycling has so many doping convictions is because they test the most. Consider for a moment what things would look like if the NFL or MLB actually took doping seriously.

"If you went to Major League Baseball and said, 'We're going to have random, unannounced, out-of-competition controls,' they would tell you, 'You're crazy. No way, we're not playing another game.' The NFL, they would never do that. NHL, no way. Golf, forget it. Tennis, forget it. Of course, cyclists get tested more than anything else, and perhaps that's why they get caught more than anyone else."