Two excellent things on the net

But first, a gratuitous picture of my sweetie at Garden of the Gods:

So Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams got together in a dark bar one night…

First Excellent Thing:BLDGBLOG has a wonderful, wonderful, delicious article about Michael Cook, a guy in Toronto who is an urban explorer, with an emphasis on subterranean exploring (especially Toronto and Hamilton). This means drains and sewers, largely. There are some sa-weet photos here, which you simply must see to appreciate. The article links to his blog (which has apparently crashed from the newfound publicity), and to sites of other underground urban explorers. Seriously, if I didn’t suddenly have a heightened sense of my own mortality (since, say, June 3 of last year), this is the kind of thing I’d be really, really tempted to do. It tickles my fancy in particular ways. Actually, I’m not saying I won’t do a little of it. The not-very-dangerous kind. Here’s a sample photo (click for larger size, as usual):

Toronto drain pic

Second Excellent Thing: Berkeley Breathed, author of the original Bloom County strip, has continued (with much less fanfare) to create Opus. Recent strips about Lola Granola jumping on the “Radical Islamist” bandwagon in her peripatetic spiritual journeying were immediately pulled from many national newspapers for fear of offending people. Pfft. I love Berk Breathed. He’s been shooting sacred cows on a regular basis since I was too young to understand political sarcasm. And we need to people like him to continue to help us see the absurdity inherent in the world around us. [click for the full comic]

Opus Islamic Fundamentalist strip

(note: I found out about this by way of boing boing, and also through Salon.com, who has not pulled the strip).