I wanna go to SXSW in Austin. I really, really wanna go. Can someone cover the hospital for me?

Today’s GlobeXplorer image: the east tower of the George Washington Bridge, the one that stands on Manhattan soil, a mere half mile from where I work. (And speaking of the Gee-Dub, I think I’ve found my newest favorite picture.)

My friend Phil has been playing with GlobeXplorer, and apparently, he lives just on the edge of a huge broccoli patch.

If anyone gets a speeding ticket in northern Virginia, one of the ones issued because a cop in a plane clocked you as driving over the speed limit, drop Mike a line — he’d love to beat it.

I had no idea that the Richter scale isn’t used anymore in measuring earthquakes. Now, seismologists use the moment magnitude scale, but since that’s such a mouthful, news organizations say that earthquakes are “magnitude X,” such as yesterday’s magnitude 6.8 in Seattle.

For those who haven’t seen home videos of the Seattle quake on the news, here’s a video from inside a computer room at Microsoft (thanks to Z). Damn, it looks like a violent quake.

Oops — a man and his two kids (six and eight years old) were left hanging when workers shut off a ski lift in Austria. The dad realized that the situation didn’t look good, and jumped 18 feet down to go find help for his kids; they got free ski passes for next season as apologies.

I’m so happy — my home city is the latest to tell the Boy Scouts where they can put their anti-gay policy. Well, they will tell them; the New York City Boy Scouts council has four months to try to convince the national organization to drop its discriminatory policies, or else all government support of the Scouts ends here.