We saw Thank You For Smoking over the weekend, and I am highly recommending it. I was physically laughing aloud, sides hurting and all, throughout the entire film, and when it concluded, I was ready to cheer – for the lobbyist! Go figure, right?! This is a movie that is right up Jamus’ alley – its sardonic, biting humor is most excellent.
Evan and I always have a friendly competition going when we travel to see who has visited the most states within this great country of ours. So when Jenna posted a map of her states visited, I decided to generate one of my own.
create your own personalized map of the USA
I figured this did not look too bad, just a few holes in the Midwest and Northeast, along with Alaska and Hawaii. I have no idea when I’ll ever be passing through Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, or South Dakota, though. I flew through the Salt Lake City airport in 2000, but I’m not sure if that actually counts as having visited Utah (on the way to Austin’s wedding!), so I’ll leave it blank…
Then I created a map of countries visited:
create your own visited country map
Yikes – look at all of that white, empty space (although I’m amused by how it filled in all of the northern-most islands of the Canadian Wilderness). Like the little red dot over Costa Rica? 
Perhaps I will use marathons as an excuse to visit some of these nations – my fellow runner, Liam, just finished the Prague Marathon, and I was thinking about how it might be an adventure to plan a trip to Sweden or Estonia or Japan for such a race experience. But perhaps I should save these ramblings for my running blog…