For starters, the comedy relief act was really clever and funny. Comedy shows and Circus acts are famous for picking on the people up front. Luckily a woman a few seats down from me got the brunt of the jokes so I didn’t get splashed, pulled on stage, put in a cage or taped up by a clown.

The costumes were very creative, the music was powerful and the artists were incredible. There was a constant texture of percussion throughout the show. At one point the stage was filled with drummers and the center point was occupied by an enormous drum with a head at least 5 feet across.

The most stunning act was of the “strong men” who leveraged their strength and weight in ways that defied physics and seemed humanly impossible. At one point, one of the performers was doing a one-handed hand stand on top of the other performer’s head. At another point in the show, artists climbed up poles…except that they held their bodies out horizontal from the vertical pole, arms extended, and moved up and down the poles with amazing synchronicity.

The see-saw act was also amazing. In rapid-fire fashion, one artist after another jumped on their see-saw end to send the other side flying in the air and ultimately stacking up to 4 people in a vertical pile. The trapeze artists were perfectly synchronized and flipped and flew threw the air and landed with the ease and softness of human cats.

I can’t imagine the stage show would travel well. That would be a huge undertaking. Platforms disappeared and gave way to different stages with different props every few minutes. It was a constant barrage of amazement.

If you’re ever in Vegas, see one of these shows. You won’t forget it.

The class will last from 8:30-4:30 pm and will be held at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

For anyone interested in becoming a beekeeper or just learning about beekeeping, this is a unique course that can’t be found elsewhere. Last year over 75 people attended and the feedback was 100% positive. This will be a rare opportunity to learn from the seasoned beekeeping experts.

For instance, in my most recent visits to a Bikram class the teacher barked at me in front of the whole class, “That’s a towel? I could use that to blow my nose. That towel is more like toilet paper!” The next class was followed by a strong critique of one of my postures: “What’s wrong, aren’t you supposed to be a teacher or something?”

Granted, I have certainly encountered Ashtanga teachers (and Iyengar, and Kripalu teachers as well…) that wanted to assert their authority over the class which kinda made the whole experience suck. But I try to keep an open mind so I decided to give the local studio a try. It was convenient, after all.

I stopped in on a Monday evening and Wes was teaching. I was surprised when he recognized me as a teacher (Atlanta is a big city) and fully expected to be ostracized as per my previous experience. But that wasn’t the case at all. The class was very pleasant (and very hot and difficult) but there was nothing but kindness from the teacher. That made a big difference and made me much more inclined to support the studio.

When I took drastic measures to narrow down the query string variables on Apartmentguide.com (by using some crazy xml import based on local page variables) our indexed page count sky-rocketed. Within 2 months our rankings climbed to the top of SERPs and our traffic went from 60k/month to 500k/month. Within a year, our traffic rose to nearly 1 million/month.

Just last week, however, Google’s webmaster Blog made the following statements:

Myth: “Dynamic URLs cannot be crawled.”
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters.

As well as:

Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic).

It may be true today that dynamic urls can be crawled when they are choc full of variables, but that has not always been the case. Calling it a “myth” is a little strange. Mod_Rewrite and Isapi Rewrite weren’t invented for nothing. And there definitely was a time when pages with long query string parameters were simply ignored by all search engines.

I think it is great that Google has overcome these obstacles to reading content. But because they made these gains does not make history a myth. Before you know it, they might claim that it is a myth that Google can’t read Flash content.

Now that the Internets have evolved to a state where my mother sends me Youtube videos and the average webmaster understands that links are good, I have actually heard other people talk about link juice. And most of the time it is like listening to someone talk about pigs, pork spending and lipstick.

Since non-SEO people are at least talking about linking and link juice, the unfortunate focus has been on acquisition. The tendency is to hoard, possess and keep it all for themselves without giving back. Because “giving back” is often mistaken as “losing link juice”. As an example, I recently heard someone suggest that they link to a related group of websites but they wanted to secretly put “no follow” tags on the links to keep their site from losing link juice. That’s kinda like saying, “hey, thanks for the good time, I’ll call ya”.

Oh, man.

I once wrote a blog post about whether Google would monitor prostitution in regards to buying and selling links, so I might as well be consistent. Giving and getting links naturally is a lot like free love. Actually, it’s more like having multiple partners, but with some discretion. It’s a two-way street, an openness to sharing. You link to sites that you like. And sites that like you link to you.

Essentially, if you have a good looking site with a great personality you tend to get lots of links. If your site is on the ugly side and not very compelling, well, you will likely not get much link action and might be tempted to buy some. Of course, in Googleland, buying links is against their terms and regarded much like buying love in the real world. And if you link to (pass link juice to) every single site you come across you just get a bad reputation and Google won’t love you.

Often, the road to success starts with giving. Pay someone a compliment, say something nice, link to someone without expectation. Reciprocal linking is really not the best route anyway. But if you participate in your greater community, you will make friends who will link to you. And if you come across a site you admire, share with others by linking to them. Don’t hoard.

….oddly enough, I just saw a post from Aaron Wall where he calls this hoarding of link juice an “SEO black hole“.

But the part that scares me is that she is so fast and not very responsive to commands such as, “No, don’t (fill in the dangerous thing)!” She loves to throw her arms in the air and scream as she goose-steps out the door. She climbed the stairs so fast yesterday that it was all I could do to keep up. And she doesn’t really understand gravity.

The next few months are sure to keep me busy.

Although it can look a bit like a turnip green, poke salad can get huge. Here are a couple of recent pictures. The first one is a rather small sprout. The bigger one is my dog’s favorite place to hang out - under the giant poke salad canopy. The big problems arise once the berries get ripe and the dogs get in it and look like they’re wearing war paint.

Now, here’s how big and unwieldy the poke salad gets. I quit fighting most of it.

Bruce sporting the Braveheart look with his poke salad war paint.

At any rate, I did manage to dig a little plot for some potatoes. And I put a few peppers and a single pumpkin in my flower garden. And, aside from a couple of emergency waterings when we were desert dry in Atlanta, I didn’t do anything to the potato plants. And sometimes that’s best.

I was out in the yard with the dogs yesterday and noticed a potato on top of the ground. And then I saw several of them. Apparently they were done. I dug around and grabbed a couple of pounds and cooked them for breakfast. It doesn’t get more fresh than that.

From the looks of it, I’m going to get about 30-40 pounds of potatoes from a small plot no bigger than 10 square feet. My pepper plants are over 3′ tall and have more peppers than I can pick and my lone pumpkin is just starting to thrive. Maybe next year I’ll have more time for a vegetable garden and Molly can help me with the planting.

My broccoli, kale and spinach seeds will be here soon and I look forward to digging up the poke salad and planting my fall garden.

So I looked it up. The Latin name for American Pennyroyal is “Hedeoma pulegioides”. Pulegioides looked a lot like the Spanish word for flea - “pulga”. Upon further research I found that first century herbalists wrote of Pennyroyal’s action to repel fleas. They probably knew a little something about how plants worked, so I decided to give it a shot.

Due to its toxicity, I had a difficult time finding pennyroyal for sale. But I was lucky enough to find a patch of pennyroyal growing in a field behind my house (in San Francisco) so I helped myself to a nice-sized cutting.

At the time, I kept my two dogs in a fenced dog run in the back yard while I was at work. So I transplanted my newly discovered Pennyroyal along the edge of the dog’s fence. Within a month, the dogs didn’t seem to need a their regular dose of the chemical flea treatment, so I skipped it. I went another two years without having to give doses of the flea-killing compound.

When I moved to Atlanta, I brought my pennyroyal with me (as well as my echinacea and a few other prized plants). But I was sorely disappointed when I moved into a new house and my fresh pennyroyal plantings didn’t seem to keep away the fleas. I had to start using the chemical stuff again as the dogs were getting attacked. Apparently the plants have to be established and it takes time to drive the fleas away (it doesn’t actually kill the fleas, it just makes them want to leave.)

I made several cuttings last fall that over-wintered well and really took off this spring. Now I have several batches of pennyroyal growing in the yard, most notably in an area where my dogs like to hang out in the shade. There have been no signs of fleas. And I haven’t given my dogs chemical flea treatment in months and my house and yard remain flea-free.

However, when the pharmacy was closed or far away, we learned to “hold off” bugs by taking a shot or two of tequila. I believe it was a Peace Corps volunteer who gave out this recipe. Amazingly, it worked.

One of my friends just told me of the success of this insta-cure when he suddenly realized that he ate some spoiled turkey for lunch. With belly gurgling and nausea building, he made a mid-day, mid-week trip to the liquor store and got a pint of the golden wild potion. After one quick shot, he felt the gurgling subside. Then he was able to go back to work.

In theory, it makes sense. Alcohol kills the bacteria that causes the big problems. I certainly wouldn’t recommend this as a replacement for a doctor’s visit or doing just about anything other than taking mid-day shots of tequila. And I really don’t even remember telling him this story - I was probably drinking tequila at the time.