Take me to the River....

Topock Marina will be replaced this fall � Route 66 News: "The Topock Marina on Old Route 66 in Topock, Ariz., will be replaced with a $14 million, 102-room hotel, spa, nightclub, microbrewery, restaurant, and conference center starting this fall, owner Chet Hitt told the Mojave Daily News."

Rogers riffs on "Row row row your boat."

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood - King Friday's Version

Propel, propel, propel your craft
Gently down liquid solution.
Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically
Existence is but an illusion.

The lonliest whale in the world

Scientists baffled by grey whale sighted off Israel : "Every spring, grey whales head north to the icy Arctic Ocean to feed. But the ice there has been melting at an alarming rate. So the theory is that after the whale left its mating grounds near Mexico, it travelled to the North Pacific, then travelled though the now open Northwest Passage and found itself in the Atlantic.

From there, it must have kept going, turning left when it reached Gibraltar, into the Mediterranean, before finding itself off the shores of Israel.

'If it did in fact go through the Arctic, it would be one of a number of species that are recolonizing the Arctic where they've never been known before in human memory,' says Barrett-Lennard."

Whales, oceans, wildlife rescue

Gray whale is freed from web of nets, swims off: "It took about four hours for a team of marine animal rescue workers to remove the mesh rope knotted around the whale's head and tail, said Tim Sullivan of the Ocean Institute in Dana Point.

Rescue workers freed the whale from a snarl of fishing nets, and it swam back into the Pacific. The whale was docile and calm throughout the rescue operation, rescuers said.

It was a happy ending to a tense, two-day episode that involved some of the nation's top marine biologists and drew hundreds of spectators to the shore. And it was first time in more than a decade that a whale has been successfully freed from nets in Southern California."

Jessica Watson's homecoming

Broadcast LIVE this Saturday: "Sydney planners have put it on the scale of New Year's Eve celebrations, but solo adventurer Jessica Watson's weekend homecoming is now officially a national event with the announcement of a live television broadcast.

Network Ten has set aside two hours of programming on its free-to-air and digital channels for the 16-year-old's arrival in Sydney Harbour on Saturday, enlisting some of its leading lights to officiate."

BP Describes Race to Fix Well

Gulf Oil Spill: "The root of the problem appears to be a towering stack of heavy equipment 5,000 feet below the surface of the gulf known as a blowout preventer. It is a steel-framed stack of valves, rams, housings, tanks and hydraulic tubing that is designed to seal the well quickly in the event of a burst of pressure. It did not work when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded."