Not so bleedin' fast, Russ Campbell!

You'd miss the Aleutians by quite a bit but you'd have to thread very carefully through the Kurile (or Kuril) Islands, which extend down from the (Russian) Kamchatka Peninsula (well-known to anyone who's ever played Risk) to the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido, forming the Sea of Okhotsk behind it towards Sakhalin.

My globe puts Seattle at about the latitude of the island of Onekotan, but Wikipedia says that according to that latitude of 47°36' N you'd hit further south, at the island of Ketoy, though if you did a little shimmy you might pass between Ketoy and Simushir just to the south.

Both of these islands are uninhabited, and only a few thousand live in all 56 of the Kuriles combined, but they've been a bone of contention between Japan and Russia since 1875 at least.

Funnily enough, I just bought one of these the other day, after our La Pavoni grinder bit the dust.

Funnily enough, the Capresso appears to be the exact same grinder with a few slightly different exterior plastic case parts: same exact burr (the old one fits), same grind-size selector (with different symbols printed on), etc. The hopper's better, though.

I'm pretty sure it came with an order form for replacement parts inside the box. Dunno if they actually honor the order form, though.

My suggestion is to rename the state "Jackson" and change the flag to a facsimile of the $20 bill.

I'm pretty sure it was Anthony Hecht, assisted by his vast army of trained monkeys.

Corianton Hale redesigned the physical paper and the website at around the same time, so he may have had some input into the creation of the blog as well; certainly the design elements and mechanics of posting comments and so on are mostly the same.

I use both Documents to Go and QuickOffice Pro on my Android phone. On my phone they are both pretty terrible for editing, but on a tablet you'd have more room.

The biggest headache isn't opening the files, it's seamlessly getting them back and forth. I use Google Docs, but I'm looking to move away from them because of Google's sponsorship of CPAC. QuickOffice and Documents to Go work great with Google Docs, but while QO works with loads of other file storage services (Dropbox, Box, Evernote, etc.) it's not the same kind of seamless experience with your desktop.

Microsoft's answer to docs in the cloud is Skydrive, and while there are apparently Skydrive apps for Android and iPhone, I haven't used them yet. I would expect Skydrive to work perfectly with Windows Phone and any tablets running similar, if there are any.

My biggest problem is actually the need to regularly open a large spreadsheet that's pushing 1 MB and has many, many rows and tabs. QuickOffice already crapped out on me with their latest "upgrade" which added all sorts of unwanted text-formatting options at the expense of being able to open the damn file; I get memory errors now.

Tierras del Sol is a fantastic place, the very last "hotel" (really just a handful of rooms and a palapa) on the road before you enter the Sian Ka'an nature reserve, but they are tiny and when I checked their prices have gone WAY up since we were there.

Ana y Jose's is probably where most wedding parties head to, but they too are expensive. Really, all the hotels along the strip south from the ruins are fantastic. We saw weddings there.

Oh, wait, you said "all-inclusive". Ergh. I'm not a fan of all-inclusives, because there is so much more to Mexico than steam-table buffets. But I guess if you're going to the Tulum area it doesn't matter TOO much, since the restaurant options along the beach road are somewhat limited.

Do make an effort to get out of the bubble, though -- the puebla or town of Tulum, up on the highway (just past the turnoff to the beach road) is an interesting place to walk around. I STRONGLY recommend taking at least one organized tour, at the very minimum a visit to a couple of cenotes (freshwater swimming holes opened up when the thin limestone crust of the Yucatan caved in). We also did an amazing walk and float through the three lagoons in Sian Ka'an, arranged out of the Weary Traveler hostel in the puebla. Your hotel should also be able to set you up with something.

As I've never stayed at them, I can't recommend one, but when we went I found the forums at playa.info and tulum.info to be extremely helpful. They're the same people; playa.info is for Playa del Carmen, but gets the bulk of the Tulum discussion as well. They have a whole section for All-inclusives. Do a search for "wedding" and dig around a little. Most of the people who post there heavily are American ex-pats or frequent visitors who really know their stuff.

If you're really bored, you can read my entire "Trip Report" that I posted back in 2005, before I knew anything about anything. I don't actually get to Tulum until Page Three. There's not a lot in there that speaks to your needs, but you might laugh.

http://www.playa.info/playa-del-carmen-forum/12969-where-i-went-holiday-trip-report.html

Nonfiction: Joseph Mitchell, Up In The Old Hotel and Other Stories. Mitchell was a New Yorker writer of oddball portraits for decades. Joe Gould's Secret (included in the above volume) is particularly poignant.

Another New Yorker writer of more recent vintage who has written perceptively about the city is Ian Frazier: Gone To New York: Adventures in the City.

The Luc Sante book mentioned above is an absolute must.

Some off-the-wall genre fiction that is both hilarious and deeply evocative of NYC is the Dortmunder series by Donald Westlake. Comic heist stories get no respect but are really fantastic. You'll learn more about New York geography from getaway driver Stan Murch's meditations on the expressway system than anywhere else. Start with The Hot Rock and work your way through these like candy. Other detective fiction set in New York includes the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout, in which his assistant Archie covers about fifty years of NYC street life. The Lawrence Block "Matthew Scudder" series is super-good too.