I’d seen plans for the amazing (and controversial) Grand Canyon Skywalk before, but Lydia has just passed on an email about it – clearly plenty of people are keenly interested. And why not? Not only can you stroll way out over the abyss on a see-through walkway, you can spit (if you’re so inclined) almost a mile.

Visitors will be looking so far straight down that the world’s tallest building, Taipei 101, would look like a pencil – if it were below them and not in, um, Taipei.

If Hitchcock were still alive, he’d be plotting a remake of “Vertigo”. This will be fear of heights incarnate.

What is touted as the highest man-made structure on Earth is in fact so fantastic that it’s made the rounds of all the urban-legends websites, but only on one snide (though popular) blog did I see a thread from last year where it was being treated as a hoax.

Part of the problem is that people have been waiting a long time for this concept to become a reality. Even the email Lydia sent repeated the official website’s “last quarter of 2006″ planned opening date, which was already a delay from summer. In fact, that’s been pushed back again to next March, according to people who have been to the construction site and asked the crew. There’s more!

Today is Mother’s Day in Thailand, this being also Her Majesty the Queen’s birthday. By way of tribute to her and other moms, this comes courtesy of Lydia, more worldly wisdom according to elementary-school pupils:

~;-)

What ingredients are mothers made of?
1. God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.
2. They had to get their start from men’s bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.

Why did God give you your mother and not some other Mom?
1. We’re related.
2. God knew she likes me a lot more than other people’s moms like me.
There’s more!

1. If you are choking on an ice cube, don’t panic. Simply pour a cup of boiling water down your throat and presto, the blockage will be almost instantly removed.

2. Clumsy? Avoid cutting yourself while slicing vegetables by getting someone else to hold them while you chop.

3. Guys! Avoid arguments with the missus about lifting the toilet seat by simply using the sink.

4. A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

5. If you have a bad cough, take a large dose of laxatives. Then you will be afraid to cough!

– Thankyou for sending these along, Lydia – they really work!

Lydia has passed on the excruciating and somehow still ongoing soap opera from Manhattan called Stolen Sidekick. If you can stand the bad grammar, neo-net spelling and sheer animosity of what’s happening live, it’s an education in the magnetic power of the web and of those legendary “thousand untold stories in the city”, this one of course being told loudly across the media board.
As uncomfortably compelling as a car crash happening right before your eyes.

Good neighbour Lydia will probably want to blame her friend Aukie Maas for transmitting this double dose of capricious comedy. I’m not sure who to blame – inevitably myself, I suppose.

Watch out for the beer

A man is waiting for his wife to give birth. The doctor comes in and informs the dad that his son was born without torso, arms or legs. The son is just a head! But the dad loves his son and raises him as well as he can, with love and compassion.

After 18 years, the son is now old enough for his first drink. Dad takes him to the bar, tearfully tells the son he is proud of him and orders up a beer for his boy. With all the bar patrons looking on curiously and the bartender shaking his head in disbelief, the boy takes his first sip of alcohol.
There’s more!