We went to the Phoenix Zoo on Sunday. Neither of us had ever been there, so we thought it'd be fun. We were surprised at how big it was! We love the Tucson zoo, but compared to the Phoenix zoo, it's crap!
The Phoenix zoo is very family-oriented, and the exhibits make you feel like you are in the animals' natural habitat. It is very similar to the London zoo. Bikes are allowed there, and you can rent bikes that can accommodate multiple people (whole families can fit on these things! it was very cool).
The exhibits had little bios on all the animals, like they told you why the wolf only had three legs, and that the 2 very old rhinos had been together since early childhood and were there to retire.
My favorite site on the internet right now: Stuff White People Like. It is hilarious and sometimes hits a little too close to home, such as in entry #16 - "Gifted" children:
White people love “gifted” children, do you know why? Because an astounding 100% of their kids are gifted! Isn’t that amazing? I’m pretty sure the last non-gifted white child was born in 1962 in Reseda, CA. Since then, it’s been a pretty sweet run.
The way it works is that white kids that are actually smart are quickly identified as “gifted” and take special classes and eventually end up in college and then law school or med school...
Because if a white kid gets crappy grades and can’t seem to ever do anything right in school, they are still gifted! How you ask? They are just TOO smart for school. They are too creative, too advanced to care about the trivial minutiae of the day to day operations of school.
Eventually they will show their creativity in their elaborate constructions of bongs and intimate knowledge different kinds of mushrooms and hash.
This is important if you ever find yourself needing to gain white person acceptance. If you see their kid playing peacefully, you say “oh, he/she seems very focused, are they in a gifted program?” at which point the parent will say “yes.” Or if the kid is lighting a dog on fire while screaming at their mother, you say “my he/she is a creative one. Is he/she gifted?” To which the parent will reply “oh, yes, he’s too creative and smart for school. We just don’t know what to do.” Either situation will put a white person in a better mood and make them like you more.
I heard that the Tucson Unified School District has decided to close Corbett Elementary School so I thought I'd go get some photos of the campus (and of course we took Elway the Dog, too):
Kerri and I have re-tooled our Flickr photos. Rather than having the typical "tags" on each photo, we have only tagged people (and dogs) in the photos. For example, a photo of Jeff and Kerri playing football would not contain any mention of football or playing, but would only be tagged with "jeff" and "kerri". The descriptions of the photos are where we might add those kinds of key words. Every photo on our Flickr account has been tagged in this manner.
So why is this important?
We wanted to make it easier to search for specific photos in our collection. When we want to find a photo of a specific friend for a specific reason, we generally had to browse through nearly 15,000 photographs. That's pretty tedious. Now we can get results via a specific search. For example, a search for the tags "Mateo" and "Marluce" will provide results with both kids in it (click here to see the results). On Flickr we can sort by popularity and date as well, to further narrow down results.
Furthermore, we can narrow down results by people who we DON'T want to see in the photo, either. For example: A search for tags "Mateo" and "Marluce" but excluding photos with "Jeff" and "Kerri" in them would show only photos with Mateo and Marluce, but nothing where Jeff and Kerri are present (click here to see the results).
Even cooler is that we can search by date. A search for "Jeff" and "Kerri" between 1/1/2002 and 12/31/2003 would only show results from within those two years (click here to see the results). So what are you waiting for? Get searching and find some great photos you didn't know existed... of you!
We went to the Phoenix Zoo on Sunday. Neither of us had ever been there, so we thought it'd be fun. We were surprised at how big it was! We love the Tucson zoo, but compared to the Phoenix zoo, it's crap!
