With Mike Herzenberg and Scott Hoffman, two of my childhood idols, I played in the three-on-three basketball portion of the 19th annual Freddy Adams Sports Tournament in Fishtown, Philadelphia.

In honor of a teenager who was killed in 1993, the tournament is a big cultural anchor point of my neighborhood.

We played well enough for being a bit out of shape and practice. We made it to the quarterfinals, the fifth to last team standing of 50 or so teams. Photos and video below.

We did some boasting, too, of course.

Watch a couple video clips kindly taken by Brian James Kirk, the first ends with nothing more than a poked eye and the second features an airball. …I swear the games were more exciting than this.

This was the first game we played, on the Saturday of the tournament, and we were clearly a little tired by then, but we won 16-10, the same score we won the second game that day. The next day we won one and lost two to get kicked out.

First, Mike Herzenberg pokes the big guy in the eye, after an absolutely non-existent box out from me — and that’s supposed to be my game!

Now a quick video of nothing…

While on our two-week national park puddle jumping trip through Utah and Colorado, my buddy Michael Butler and I took a day to do some amazing whitewater rafting on the Cache La Poudre River with Mountain Whitewater Descents.

The trip included a handful of Class Four rapids, a half dozen Class Three rapids and consistent Class Two water. I had done a trip on the Delaware River that I enjoyed, but this was even more thrilling.

See more photos on Facebook here and check out a little video clip of Michael and me leading our boat below.

With my good buddy Mike Butler, I just came back from two weeks road tripping and hiking Utah and Colorado and what a trip it was.

Overall, we spent $3,021.85 on the two week trip. That means each of us spent at least $1,510.93 driving some 2,100 miles and visiting six national parks, crashing in four hotels, two campgrounds and lots of tent spots.

Below, find a quick run down with hopes of going into greater detail later.

We flew into Salt Lake City, coming into the airport over the Great Salt Lake and the nearby Salk Lake Desert, what an interesting view.

We pulled over for the Utah state sign and spent the night in Salt Lake City, taking in a brew pub, visiting the Church of Latter Day Saints Temple area, cruising the University of Utah and driving other neighborhoods.

The next morning, it was on to Zion National Park, where we arrived early that evening.

Our first trip was six miles of arduous climbing up Weeping Rock to a backcountry trail.

The terrain was fascinating, though it often made for hard hiking.

First camp ground, the next morning, having arrived there at night.

The views weren’t half bad.

Angel’s Landing was our hike the next day and an arduous one at that.

A break at the lodge before hiking back up Weeping Rock, at least then without full packs.

The next morning we were off, and made a quick visit through Bryce Canyon.

Though nearby, the sky patterns and relationship to the canyons was altogether different.

I was excited about Arches National Park, home to more strangely eroded sandstone than anywhere in the world.

The longest naturally-formed rock span in the world, more than 300 feet, Landscape Arch.

Of course we did the hike out to Delicate Arch, the state’s signature.

Camping on state ground outside Arches and along the Colorado River, we moved camp sites for a better spot in an unorthodox way.

Off roading in Canyonlands National Park, that’s the road.

Sunset over Murphy’s Point in Canyonlands, where we smoked cigars and watched a beautiful night of stars.

We made it to Colorado!

Well that was a waste of time…

The calmer edges of the north rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

Our last two camping nights…

Oh, what up, elk.

Mostly in the mid-60s on this day, but the snow patches were plentiful.

You pee in both directions and see which stream gets there faster.

Bear Lake.

Rocky Mountain National Park had some beautiful views, though because everything is of a higher elevation, it mostly just seems like mountains, nothing of great signature.

No more hiking. Our last night is plunked in a campgrounds, with a nice fire and some whiskey.

Hell yes, we went whitewater rafting on the Cache La Poudre River. See more on this here.

Things I learned:

• There were camels in Utah 10,000 years ago (and there are some there now for tours, in addition to mammoth at the end of the last Ice Age.

I spent the last week on a road trip dotting across the southern half of cloudy Ireland.

Touring with longtime friends Michael Butler and James Spadola, I knocked off a couple items on my list. We drove more than 600 miles and roughly hit this map. Our itinerary here and expenses here.

See highlights of the tour below.

We started in Dublin (a city where nearly a quarter of the country’s population lives), went west to Galway, a few stops south through Limerick toward Cork and Blarney and then back north to Dublin.

In Dublin, we visited the Temple Bar area, the historic Dublin Castle surroundings, St. Stephen’s Green and other neighborhoods. Lots of walking, pubs and, yes, drinking to address necessary stereotypes, cultural norms and the Irish heritage we all shared.

Our first formal tourist stop, after a quiet neighborhood pub, we took to the home of Jameson. Not only did we take the standard Jameson Distillery tour, but I volunteered for a whiskey taste-testing and we had a couple whiskeys to kick the night off.

Music was a favorite of mine, including that which we found walking through famed St. Stephen’s Green, a public park in the city.

A couple people I met the night before recommended stopping at Leo Burdock’s, called Dublin’s oldest fish ‘n chips shop.

Of course, we took the Guiness Storehouse tour, which is certainly touristy but the overlook bar atop was a genuine experience.

After leaving Dublin’s reach, we visited Howth, one a small fishing village now a beautiful, water-driven suburb.

We took a little video.

And ate a delicious seafood meal of mussels, shrimp, crawfish and calimari.

Driving west, we passed by some smaller castles, for which we naturally stopped:

We had great joy in our travels in between our destinations.

We kicked off our visit to Galway by dropping in on a game of hurling as part of the annual Gaelic Games.

A second Irish breakfast at Fibber Magee’s on the square before leaving Galway.

We drove through the Burren National Park, making a few stops along the way.

Our quick tour of the famed Cliffs of Moher were one of the more incredible sights I’ve ever seen, standing more than 700 feet tall from the ocean below.

Before we got there, we had a traditional Irish snack.

Then the sights.

And banter

And cow feeding (in which James tries to feed Bessie dirt, because he thinks it’s grass)

Outside Cork is Blarney with its famed castle and, yes, the Blarney Stone, which you kiss for a chance at eloquence.

I had two favorite experiences, one being driving our manual Toyota Corolla on the left side of the road from the right side of the car:

The other favorite experience being trad singing, trying to catch up to the familiar Irish ballads in pubs, both touristy and not.

This is one song, Dirty Old Town, we heard quite a bit, being performed by the Pogues, an Irish band from the 1980s whose exported rock stylings I’ve dug.

Wild Rover is another classic we heard more than any other and Hand Me Down My Bible is one we heard a couple times, though this a particularly poppy-sounding one.

I finally dug into the 1951 American dystopian classic novel ‘Fahrenheit 451‘ by Ray Bradbury. It focuses on a world in the future in which firemen play a very different role, with a message of anti-censorship. If you need a refresher on the book, check out this wrap video here.

It quickly became one of my favorite novels. I wanted to share a few of my favorite lines and my favorite passage from the book.

“He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.” p. 12

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.” p. 58

“Cram them full of noncombustible datra, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with.” p. 61

“We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead og growing on good rain and black loam.” p. 83

“Those who don’t build must burn.” p.89

“You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of them swimming between the clouds, like the enemy discs, and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire; that was how the night felt.” p. 92

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.” p. 104

“Listen,” said Granger, taking his arm and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass. “When I was a boy, my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he never would do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the action stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.” p. 156

A year ago, my housemate Sean Blanda and I had something of a mouse problem.

We weren’t exactly overrun with mice, but I had come across small ones in my kitchen and had our share of droppings.

Our friend was moving and couldn’t take her cat Penny Lane. We welcomed her, eradicated our mouse problem, had a little soldier for the occasional bug or fly and a very playful friend. One year later, she’s still cute and we haven’t had any signs of infestation since.

Other photos below.

Due in Columbia at the University of Missouri for an invite-only journalism roundtable starting Sunday evening, I took the opportunity to fly into St. Louis a day early to explore the Gateway to the West.

I’m sure glad I did.

I arrived Saturday afternoon and was met by my couchsurfing host Alan (read about couchsurfing and my first experience with it a few years ago here). That started a night and a Sunday morning exploring what was the country’s fourth largest city a century ago. Facebook photos here.

Let me share a quick itinerary of the cool things I got to do and see:

SATURDAY, APRIL 16

• Visit St. Louis
• Tour the Anheuser-Busch primary brewery and headquarters
• Get overview of St. Louis neighborhoods from local
• Eat local catfish at local bar while drinking local Schlafly beer and listening to local live music, at the Broadway Oyster Bar
• Visit Soulard district

• Drive through North St. Louis and talk about urban decay and joblessness
• Visit Old North St. Louis, a portion of the struggling depths of the city that features a lot of community activism and features Crown Plaza, a fascinating one-block strip that has been completely renovated but lacks the businesses to go in. When we visited, three of 30 storefronts were occupied. That said, it’s still a celebrated part of revitalization.
• Have a milkshake at the Crown Candy Kitchen, which opened in 1913 and maintains mid-20th century booths
• Visit the City Museum, an “eclectic mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel.”
• OK, just so I’m clear here, EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO VISIT THE CITY MUSEUM IN ST. LOUIS. It is amazing, bizarre and there is no reason that legally it is going to be able to remain open because it is insane and wonderful and could never exist in a place like Philadelphia. It came strongly recommended and advised.
• Walk Washington Ave. entertainment district
• Uh, take in the dueling pianos at a local hot spot
• Drive through Forest Park, home of the 1904 World’s Fair and one of the 100 largest urban parks in the country.
• Drive through the St. Louis University campus
• Marvel at my couchsurfing host’s beautiful home, featuring extensive architectural salvage, restored grandfather clocks, reclaimed wood and the like

SUNDAY, APRIL 17

• Breakfast of fruit with my couchsurfing host’s family
• Climb the Gateway Arch (Jefferson National Expansion Memorial) and be awed by its size (630 feet high and wide, roughly 63 stories) and grace, though the top of the arch is conspicuously like, well, like the top of an arch.
• Tour Old St. Louis Courthouse where the Dred Scott case was first heard
• Walk Laclede’s Landing and eat at Sundecker’s
• Drive the two hours west to University of Missouri

TUESDAY, APRIL 18

• Eat toasted ravioli at Milo’s in the Hill Italian district
• Just missed being injured by a tornado at the airport.
• Had a slight weather airplane delay, but made it back home to Fishtown, Philadelphia to the home I love.

What I didn’t do:

• Go to a Cardinals game in beautiful downtown Busch Stadium (they were away playing the Dodgers)
• More formally drive a portion of Route 66
• Eat frozen custard at Ted Drews
• Eat local donuts or Imo’s pizza
• Visit nearby ancient native Cahokia Mounds
• See the inside of the Basilica of St. Louis
• Listen to straight St. Louis Blues

How much I spent: $135 ($20 at Broadway Oyster Bar, $22 for two admissions into the City Museum, $17 at Sundeckers, $20 in beers, $40 in gas $8 and $6 for quick meals at the airports before leaving and coming home respectively.)

A police officer friend welcomed me to ride along for the latter half of his 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. patrol this Saturday, and I eagerly accepted. After providing and filing paperwork a few weeks prior, I climbed into his Crown Victoria and took to patrolling a relatively quiet college town, particularly so, considering the college was on spring break.

I was left with a few take aways:

• I found myself trying to parse what culture, rules and protocol were local to his department, state-wide or universal — and all came into play.
• Patrolling was much more of a team sport than I expected.
• There was more action than I expected for a sleepy college town during spring break — a few car stops, a couple pedestrian interactions and a car stop and search.
• Aggressive cops, of course, get more stops, while simultaneously stopping more innocent people too. Where the line is for all of that is about as American and challenging a debate as we have.
• Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is pretty good

Photo by Flickr user 10-42Adam.

People still filing into Wing Bowl 19.

It was about 7:30 a.m.when porn legend Ron Jeremy leaned into a microphone and told 15,000 people inside a basketball stadium everything anyone needed to know about the sleazy entertainment, competitive eating binge before us and its place of origin.

“This,” started ‘the Hedgehog,’ his signature long, greasy hair and mustache alive in the sea of Wing Bowl 19 Friday, Feb. 4, “would only work in Philadelphia.”

I arrived at the stadium district of South Philadelphia with a buddy some two hours earlier, slinging back Kenzingers on the walk from the subway to the Wells Fargo Center, home of the Sixers and Flyers. We were there to see our first competitive eating match — this a battle of several dozen eaters cleaning the meat off of hot buffalo wings — but the event has developed its own reputation for other kinds of excess: large-scale entourages entering on floats, strippers, porn stars, event promotions and marketing, flashing, drinking and its ilk.

Some see Wing Bowl, which was founded by a couple of sports talk shock jocks at 610 AM WIP, as perfectly Philadelphian in its regional flavor and for giving sex and sleaze to binge eating, a true carnival of excess. Of course, others just see it as the most boorish display in a city known for such depths. [The second Philly institutional event of the year for me.]

Whatever the case, it was an experience I’ve wanted to see first hand, and I thought I ought to pass on some of my experience.

Below, I share text message reports from that day, those that I sent and some I should have.

Watch this video from someone else’s Wing Bowl 19 experience.

4:55 a.m. Picked up by my buddy, we’re heading for the Broad Street Line.

5:17 a.m. Pack of 15 guys, a crew of middle-aged roughneck types and who look like their sons. They have cardboard Wawa containers with lite beer and are tanking them as we leave the Walnut-Locust stop.

5:21 a.m. Big guy with a bald head and a thick goatee: “one thing I like about trains, ain’t nothing wrong with sipping vodka on the road.”

5:28 a.m. Same guy gives advice to kid: “this is America. you get whatever you want if you complain enough.”

5:37 a.m. We at stadium district, a lot more drunk, loud dudes than I realized were on that train

5:47 a.m. After couple beers in parking lot, we pile into stadium, through security

6:04 a.m. $10 tickets at all levels, but only mezzanine was available when I got, only half full now, people filing in

6:10 a.m. floor of stadium half for competitive eating and 610 WIP guys, half with mechanical bull for girls and a band

6:14 a.m. women everywhere, including the wingettes who ask for the chance to be involved

6:23 a.m. Chubby 20-something with a beer to my right says when first girl flashing is on big screen… “I will be coming here everyday until the day i die”

6:31 a.m. Lower levels have girls and seems classier group, up here, it’s mostly dudes with binoculars

6:45 a.m. Eaters have been coming in with their entourages, including lots of girls and strippers, lots of flashing in stands

6:46 a.m. one of the favorites is from Ontario, Canada; 60 to one odds on the big guy from Manayunk

6:48 a.m. and then Ron Jeremy was here

6:53 a.m. three major things we have excess of: wings, sex and bizarre costumes

7:13 a.m. now entering Kenzo Kev.

7:16 a.m. A homeless guy named ‘Not Rich’ comes in — he seems overwhelmed and it seems fucked up

7:16 a.m. all these dudes won different regional contests to get to be here, surprised no lady participants

7:17 a.m. and the guy who won at SugarHouse was ‘Gentleman Joe’ wearing a Yankees shirt

7:20 a.m. the mezzanine has now descended into chaos [in a corner, two girls had started flashing and hordes of men were looking at the first flesh on the second level]

7:33 a.m. Ron Jeremy says: ‘this would only work in Philadelphia’

8:13 a.m. The weed smell just got stronger at halftime, and, yes, there is a halftime.

8:22 a.m. apparent Wing Bowl toolkit: binoculars, camera, beer, generic Philly sports gear and hot female friend you don’t necessarily respect but who craves attention

8:33 a.m. I bet you’ve never seen this many strippers on a mechanical bull.

8:37 a.m. in brilliant partnerships, lots of strip clubs promote by bringing girls, but some normal women are in the stands, not seeming slutty, just having fun, though, yes, some seem desperate, very desperate

8:41 a.m. audience mostly packs of middle-aged guys and lots of 20 and 30 something dudes, some with female friends

8:42 a.m. good god, that is a big pile of wings

8:51 a.m. They’re calling the $50k winning package the biggest prize in competitive eating history. this is carnival of excess

9:21 a.m. oh btw, kobayashi ate a cheesesteak in less than 20 seconds and says he’ll compete next year

9:53 a.m. winner won by one wing, three-time winner, 255 wings in an hour, ow

Meeting my January professional resolution of working for myself, earlier this month I came on full-time to a company I co-founded: publishing consultancy Technically Media, which is behind technology news Technically Philly.

We also moved into office space as part of my leading for us a major foundation grant research project on open data.

I made the jump for a startup, after leaving homeless advocacy nonprofit Back on My Feet, through which I learned many lessons.

We have a payroll services company, accountant, attorney, and, after my third partner comes on fulltime, we’ll look toward health insurance. I’m surely proud of that.