We’d like to introduce a new feature on Strange Proportion. Many of you couldn’t get enough of our Pennypages feature in 2005, and we’ve been neglecting this young star’s fans for too long. So this month, we’re unveiling LOLpenny. That’s right. We’ve caught the meme. We just can’t shake it, and neither can Penny. Click on a thumbnail to enlarge it.

But seriously . . . you must peruse PhiLOLsophers, courtesy of Pete Mandik’s Brainhammer. (If you’re at all intestered in philosophical questions surrounding consciousness and cognition, the nonLOL parts of his blog might entertain you as well.)

NO - U KANT!

Sometimes I think eBay should be more careful about their auto-generated Google ads. Sometimes they’re a bit random and nonsensical, but sometimes they’re downright creepy:

I found a website yesterday called picturesofwalls.com, which is devoted to collecting clever or contextually interesting graffiti. There are a lot of gems amid some rubbish, such as these:

We went to Oaxaca for two weeks. Did you miss us? I’ll post the photoblog soon, but writing all those captions can be time consuming and I haven’t had a chance yet. Here’s a teaser, from the tiny village of Chacahua, where we stayed at the tail end of our stint at the beach.

After getting robbed when we were in Guatamala two summers ago, we decided on this trip to pack nothing we cared anything about, including the digital camera. We hauled five disposable cameras around with us, which meant no zoom, no retakes, few clandenstine shots, and no previews to hint at whether the picture had come out at all. We had them developed to CD when we returned home, but you can still see the graininess, dust, and scratches in the digital versions, which irks me.

Oaxaca turns out to be a bustling city with a thriving middle class. Suave guys in name-brand jeans facebooked each other on Macbooks in cafés. Moms drove their daughters to private school in Toyotas. And here we were with nothing: I took a credit card, a debit card, and my passport in a money belt. Everything else was either clothes, books, basic toiletries, or a snorkel. Always learning lessons, we are. Next time, we’ll feel perfectly comfortable taking the digital camera to Oaxaca, and we won’t take anything to Guatemala. (That is, if we ever go back to Guatamala, which is doubtful. It has been decided that vacationing amid real and wrenching poverty is not fun. It makes you feel like a sick voyeur peering into someone else’s private misery. What else can you feel but shame to realize that your shoes probably cost more than some people make in a month. Literally. We’ve decided that, if we head toward poverty again, it will be to volunteer.)

Of course, Oaxaca is in Mexico, so there was plenty of poverty to be found: indigeno children who should have been in school instead begging for pesos on the street, old men in the villages hauling things to and fro on their burros, etc. But nothing we saw was as destitute as what we had seen in Guatemala.

More stories will follow, but for now I’ll just describe the adventurous day we had trying to leave. Dean had just crossed the Yucatan peninsula and was headed across the Gulf toward Veracruz. We arrived at the airport at 7:30 am to get Maris onto her flight to Mexico City, where she’d connect to a flight back to New Mexico. Once we’d seen her off, we took a walk in a park just outside the airport to pass the four hours until our departure. We returned about 10:30 am to find that our 11:55 flight to Houston (the sole daily flight to the U.S. from Oaxaca) had been cancelled due to Dean’s interference with its flight path. The flights for the following two days were full, but the ticket counter lady assured us that we could be on a flight as soon as Saturday (this being Wednesday). We objected to that idea, so she changed our ticket instead to depart from Mexico City the following morning at 6:00 am, but we were on our own to get there (it’s an eight-hour bus ride). On a whim, we stopped at the Mexicana airlines ticket counter, to be told it would cost us $200 per ticket to get on a waiting list, which we declined. Then we hopped over to the Click airlines counter (a JetBlue-like upstart) who had $180 tickets departing in five minutes. Were we ready to depart now? Could we be on that flight? Yes, please. Painfully expensive, and not technically in the budget, but we had little other choice.

So we ran through security (I didn’t even bother to put my belt or shoes back on until we were safely on the plane). They stopped us and made us gate-check our backpacks, which we hate to do because it always costs us precious time at baggage claim. We boarded the plane, they promptly closed the doors behind us, and the plane pulled away from the gate. The nice Oregonian rancher who had been behind us in line and in the same predicament failed to get to the plane in time. We relaxed on the one-hour flight to Mexico City and plotted how we would get to Houston the same day.

The Oregonian rancher, a thin guy with a big bushy beard, wearing a plaid shirt and boot-cut jeans secured by a belt with a big rancher belt buckle, was actually a transplant. He’d just started building a house in Oaxaca, he explained, and used his home here as a hub for his travels. Apparently he’d done well in the ranching business, or his ranch land had appreciated enough that selling it had set him up for life. He’d just returned from a five-month trip to southern Argentina, Chile, and Antarctica, where he said he’d taken 10,000 photos and had swum with penguins. Being a horseman, he said, he had a knack for animals, and he’d formed a bond with the penguins that most other people could not. I never got his name, but I really enjoyed meeting him, in part because his story was so intriguing, but also because hearing it encouraged me that setting foot on Antarctica sometime during my life is actually an achievable dream, and actually not really that difficult, if you can make it to the very southern tip of Argentina.

Once we landed in Mexico City, we retrieved our bags and headed straight to the Continental airlines ticket counter. We explained what had happened, and asked if there were any flights to DC leaving that day. The woman at first said she couldn’t change our tickets because the cancelled flight had been on an affiliate airline and their cancellation was not Continental’s problem. We insisted that it had been a Continental Express flight, but she wouldn’t believe us until I was able to dig up our printed Travelocity itinerary that I’d shoved into some flap of my backpack before leaving the US, an iterinary that clearly showed the Continental logo and flight number. She put us on a plane to DC departing in half an hour, with a layover in Houston. We thanked her kindly and ran to the gate.

We boarded without incident and settled in. It was then we noticed that we had only an hour to get through customs and security in Houston and make it to our next flight. This made us slightly tense.

We became more tense when we landed and saw the snaking line at the passport counters. We slowly resigned ourselves to shuffling through the maddeningly slow maze amid the frat boys and fat Texans returning from their vacations in Cancun and Acapulco. 30 minutes later we had the Homeland Security stamps in our passports and ran to security to find yet another serpentine line of aggravated souls. At this point, we had 15 minutes until departure. We began to sweat. Someone convinced the Houston TSA people that some of us were in a crunch and perhaps could be granted some special treatment to make our flights on time. They let us all into the Elite First-class Members-only Silver-spoon security line (which pissed off the Elite quite a bit), but we removed our shoes and our belts and our coins and got through quickly. Five minutes to go. We ran to the gate . . .

. . . only to find that the gate had been changed. Our flight to DC now departed from a different terminal on the opposite side of the airport in four minutes. Corinne asked if maybe they’d be kind enough to ask the plane to wait. The woman told us to take a cart. So we took a cart.

The first cart we saw was being held up because an indignant, fat Texan tourist was yelling at the driver about how he had wronged her. This was the same woman who I’d seen yelling at a fellow line-waiter back in security as they put their shoes back on. “If you don’t start treating me with a little more respect, mister, you’re going to regret it,” I’d heard her saying at the time. (In general, I believe that if one finds oneself encountering multiple completely unreasonable assholes within a very short span of time, perhaps it best to stop and consider if oneself might instead be the asshole.) So we took the second cart we saw, which was fortunate, because it was driven by a guy who had no regard for pedestrians, almost running several of them down to get us to the gate on time.

For the second time in a day, we were the last people on board the plane. At the gate, they gave us the emergency exit row seats, we climbed on board, they shut the doors, and then the plane sat at the gate for 30 minutes waiting for the go-ahead from air traffic control to take off.

We finally took off, and we watched Shrek 3 (unfunny and disappointing) to pass the time, landing in DC at 11:00 pm. We got to the Metro and caught the yellow line train, making it to Fort Totten just in time to catch the last red line train of the night. We got home, dumped our backpacks on the living room floor, and headed to bed. 17 hours from start to finish, but we made it. I was able to be at work the next morning bright eyed and bushy tailed to wade through the couple of hundred emails awaiting my reply.