I'm All Shook Up

Last month, I made my first real trip to Los Angeles. I was there covering the X-Games for my friends as ESPN.com. We were taking 360 degree panoramics of the venues for the EXPN.com website. (You can view the panoramics here. Just scroll down to 360 Course Galleries.)

On our first full day in LA, we got off to a fairly early start. Somewhere around 10am I believe. We headed  over to the Home Depot Center to check out the action but first had to stop and get breakfast. You can't work on an empty stomach. 

We relied on our Garmin gps to lead us to a quaint breakfast spot nearby, an IHOP in Compton. Halfway through our meal, we felt a little rumble. Kind of like a train passing by on the tracks next to the restaurant. Only there weren't any train tracks nearby. It was an earthquake. A 5.4 magnitude earthquake that shook the building and sent the hanging light fixtures swaying back and forth in the air.

Funny thing is, nobody panicked. Not even the three guys from Bristol, CT, and me, the naive southern boy. I think if any of the natives would have moved, the four of us would have been fighting for the space under our table.

It was business, or breakfast, as usual in Southern California.

A Bird in the Hand....

I recently had the chance to photograph Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park in Scotland Neck, NC for the Images of the Roanoke Valley magazine.

The park was started by Mike Lubbock and features over 2500 birds, from 170 species. Sylvan Heights is also home to a breeding center that has successfully hatched 17 of the 44 "Globally Threatened Species" from around the world.

Visitors to the park can view birds from every continent except Antarctica.

Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener...

It's not every day that the WienerMobile hangs out in front of your hotel.

It's funny how some commercials just stick in your mind. Oscar Mayer probably has two of the top ten lodged somewhere in the vast emptiness of my brain. Who can forget "My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R..."

Of course, these commercials are from a time when kids spent their time sitting in front of the TV. 

Now, kids just spend their time sitting in front of the Playstation or Nintendo.