Yesterday my fiancé told me about a horrific accident at a Six Flags where a girl lost her feet on a ride. He also told me it was at Six Flags Great Adventure in southern New Jersey, which it is was not. The incident took place at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom. Thinking it was the NJ location, though, I automatically assumed the ride would be the same one reported to have “ripped a girl’s hair out” when I was younger. I believe it was called Free Fall.

I’m guessing the hair story is a suburban legend, did it make the rounds in Philadelphia as well? Does anyone out there know if this was even remotely true? Regardless, I found myself in line for Free Fall one year, and chickened out at the last minute. It was completely irrational, I just couldn’t do it. I like my hair in my head.

I was just sorting through the new mail in my inbox, when I clicked on today’s Daily Candy for Philly. Most days I don’t find Daily Candy particularly interesting, as it’s primarily recommendations for very fashionable designers or treatments at spas and in my current life as a grad student, I don’t have much in the way of disposable income. But I continue to subscribe, because I enjoy torturing myself with the things I can’t have.

However, today’s Daily Candy didn’t send me into spasms of longing. My reaction instead was, “are you kidding me?” They featured a local florist who, for a (I’m guessing fairly high) price will send someone out to your house in order to design your window boxes. Is it just me, or does that seem like the height of laziness? Window boxes are not large garden spaces, and picking out a few flowers and small plants to tuck into them isn’t a difficult task.

I guess it’s no worse than much of the other outsourcing we do in our lives these days, but for some reason, this particular service hit me as taking it too far. What do you guys think? Is it a smart use of resources to hire a florist to plant your window boxes or is it taking outsourcing culture one step too far?

Once more we have an opportunity to stop ‘Drive Through-Mastecomy’s’. As it stands today insurance companies will not cover a hospital stay, sending women home, only hours after their operations. Senate Bill S.459 and House Bill H.R. 119 known as ‘The Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act’ seeks to allow women a 48 hour hospital stay, forcing the insurance co. to step up.

This has been fought over each year since 1997. The Republican majority never allowed it out of committee for a vote. Please contact your representatives and let them know you support these bills and thank those Republican’s who have been supporting this legislation these past ten years.

If you are looking for a way to get out of the heat tonight, make your way over to L’Etagee at 6th and Bainbridge and check out the First Person Arts Story Slam. The theme tonight is “Boiling Point” and Inquirer food writer Rick Nichols will be hosting. Story Slam is an opportunity for people to get up and tell their stories in front of a live audience. I’ll be there, along with fellow Philly blogger Scott. If you see us, come over and say hello.

Two South Jersey boardwalks have been choosen by FineLiving.com as being among the Top Ten Boardwalks in America. The historic boardwalk of Atlantic City first built in 1870 so sand would not ruin the carpets in the hotels and the boardwalk of Ocean City N.J. home to historic Shriver’s Salt Water Taffy.
Click here for a photo of Ocean City boardwalk.

Of course, those of us living in Philadelphia have always known about the great places down the shore at less than a 2.5 hour drive. Cape May at the Southern tip, Wildwood, Sea Isle, all have interesting boardwalks. It is nice others across the country have recognized the gifts we have been given.

Ah hah, I saw this photo earlier in the day posted to Flickr and I hoped it would end up in our Metroblogging Philadelphia Flickr pool as well, and it did. I just love the quality of light in this photo and that there are no people to be seen anywhere. (When does Rittenhouse Square ever look this empty? I want to go there then!)

Photo by awturnitup

Holgas have such a lovely vintage quality, and awturnitup really used that to great effect here.

Please add your Philadelphia photos to the Metroblogging Philadelphia Flickr group. Readers’ photos will be featured here on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

When the article in the Philly Weekly was printed about my Reading Terminal Market blog, I got a flurry of emails from people who had read it. Some were stories about experiences at the Market, others were congratulations from people I hadn’t been in touch with in years and a few were from people who were working on other projects about Philly that they thought I might be interested in.

One such project is a blog called Photo Philly. It belongs to Emily and Dave, and their goal is, well, I’ll just them tell you.

Our goal is to go all around Philly and take pictures of, well, everything. To make things simple, we’ve split up the city into 1 square mile grids, and we want to hit every gridpoint (all 233 of them!), ideally taking photos which capture the beauty of all parts of the city. We will probably overlay some other maps as time goes on.

They are using a google map to track where they’ve been and you can get a quick look at some of their pictures by clicking on the markers on the map. It’s a pretty neat idea and I wish them lots of luck in completing their project.

If you normally listen to the streaming audio from WXPN while at work, you’ll find that the feed will be silent tomorrow. They, along with other internet radio stations, are going off the air tomorrow in order to protest the royalty rates that could go into effect as early at July 15th.

Silence is what Internet radio may sound like after that date because of a royalty rate hike scheduled to go into effect. The new rates will also be retroactive for 17 months and payment will become due to the SoundExchange collection organization under the terms of a recent Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision. The new rates could cost WXPN more than $100,000 annually; several times the annual funds raised by business support on the Internet streams.

The regular XPN signal will go silent for two minutes at 4 pm tomorrow afternoon as well. If keeping internet radio affordable and accessible is important to you, please take a moment to sign the online petition.

XPN Copyright Update

I have lived three blocks away from the Joseph Fox Bookshop (1724 Sansom Street) for the last five years, and until today, I had never walked up the half-flight of stairs to check them out. Located half a block away from the Rittenhouse Square Barnes and Noble, it had never occurred to me to go any further, although I’ve never been satisfied by that mass-market chain.

What took me there today was a desire to finally get my hands on a copy of the Wissahickon Trail Map that I’ve been wanting since January. The Friends of the Wissahickon website listed a variety of places around the city where their maps were available, and the Joseph Fox was the closest to me. Walking in, I immediately experienced sensory overload, in a way I love. Every inch of space is covered with books, and I couldn’t proceed more than a couple of feet beyond the door, because I wanted to take it all in. They have so many amazing books, stocking only single editions of most things, so that they can maximize the variety of options available to shoppers.

I easily found my trail map, and also ended up picking up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I’ve been wanting the book since it came out, and they happened to have several autographed copies left over from the store’s signing that the author gave recently.

These days buying your food locally is all the rage. I recommend you try to buy your books locally and independently as well.

Oh, I’m supposed to post things here? I almost forgot. (Kidding, I’ve just been really busy.)

But I am sorry to have left you in a photographic lurch this past week. I will try to do better this week! There have been a lot of photos recently posted to our Metroblogging Philadelphia Flickr group, so I will be featuring some of these this week.

To start your week off, here is a view of Philadelphia that I took from the Fairmount Waterworks this past weekend. I met up with some other local photobloggers to wander around the area until dusk, so if you are interested to see more, their photos are being added to this Philadelphia Area Photobloggers pool.

It was an absolutely beautiful weekend, wasn’t it?

Please add your Philadelphia photos to the Metroblogging Philadelphia Flickr group. Readers’ photos will be featured here on Tuesdays and Thursdays.