What great news! Let's go celebrate with a Big Mac!

Salt Lake City has been named Men's Fitness magazine's "Fittest City in America" for 2009 according to this January press release out of Salt Lake City (opens a PDF).  I don't live in SLC proper, so I guess I'm not one of the fittest, but there must be some halo effect there somewhere, right?  Hmmm... I better get out there and run today...

The country's fattest city?  Try Miami, FL.  Yeah, I'm stunned too.  I suppose not every woman there's going to look like Emily Procter.  Oh, well.

By the way, my hometown of Fresno, CA came in as #22 (on the fittest side) this year.

The Wheels on the Bus...

The other evening, I had the privilege of being a "bus usher" for tours of the new LDS Temple in Draper.  It's a beautiful Temple set up on a hillside and its lights can be easily seen from the valley.  Anyway, my responsibility was to make sure that people touring the Temple got from the parking lot of a nearby LDS church up to the Temple and back -- safely.  Safely is the operative word here.

You see, I was working Wednesday evening.  Most of the LDS (at least in my area) know what that means -- Young Men/Young Women -- and there were a lot of youth groups there!  Most were quite well behaved as you might expect people visiting a holy place might be.  However there were a couple of exceptions...

The bus I was on was one of those where the seats were placed on the sides and faced inward, so it had a large aisleway.  Because the evenings are so busy, I was always the last one on, and always standing.  On one ride back down the hill from the Temple, one particularly brave teenage girl decided she was going to be brave and "surf" the aisle (or at least strike a pose like she was riding a surfboard).  Well, guess what?  When she was done and had stood up and turned around to say whatever to her friends (what do bus surfing teenage girls say, anyway), the bus driver braked to slow our ride down the hill.  So what happens then?  All you physics majors would know that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, so while the seats attached to the bus, people sitting in the seats attached to said bus, and the people holding onto something slowed down with the bus, this girl kept going forward.  Lucky for her, a few people reached out to rescue her, including yours truly.  No harm, no foul, no more surfing.

The other group involved the boys (gotta keep it fair here).  A couple of Young Men decided they needed to start a round of "The Wheels on the Bus".  They were quickly silenced by their adult leaders.  Frankly, I'm amazed there weren't more renditions of that song.  But at least they were there, and I hope they all learned and felt something they can keep with them.  I sure did.

"Global Warming Causes Snakes To Grow As Big As Buses!"

I can just see the headlines now.

According to this story in USA Today, scientists are talking about a 42 foot long snake fossil that was discovered in Colombia.  It is estimated to have lived about 58 million years ago and weighed 1 ton.  How did it get so big?  Well, scientists are hypothesizing that since a snake is a reptile and can't regulate its body temperature, it needed a warm environment to grow that large.  During the time that this snake lived, the earth was thought to have been very warm, with no ice at the poles, allowing these snakes to grow this big.  With the polar ice caps melting away, it won't be long now before these big dudes start appearing.  Annaconda anyone?

Oh, and just ignore the sentence near the end that says society wouldn't let a snake reach that size again.  It just makes for a better story that way.