185) Good morning!

The other night, I was spending a quiet Friday evening reading bits of the CIA World Factbook out loud to two of my friends. I was especially loving all the random islands, reefs and atolls that are listed in there because they don't really belong with any of the countries. Examples include Kingman Reef, Howland Island, and Jan Mayen.

A. mentioned a grade-school classmate of his whose father had been stationed on an island somewhere. Something that sounded like "Quadjulan."

I took it into my head to find this Quadjulan. There was nothing like it listed in the CIA World Factbook. I went to Google and searched for quadjulan, quadulan, quadu*, quadju*, qadju*, qadu*, and a bunch of other things. Nothing.

There was one hit under "Quadulant," but I figured that was because someone else out there had misspelled the same name.

So I went back to the World Factbook and began clicking on islands, figuring that eventually I would hit the cluster of islands with "Quadjulan" on the map.

Sure enough, after awhile, I did. It's actually spelled Kwajalein and is one of the US Marshall Islands. (Did you know that the Marshall Islands are located about halfway between Hawaii and Papua New Guinea? Did you know that their natural resources include phosphate deposits, marine products, and deep seabed minerals? Did you know that the president is Kessai Hesa? These are only a few of the fascinating facts that the CIA is giving away on the internet... for free!)

Once I had the correct spelling, I searched for Kwajalein and came up with a bunch of stuff. Most interestingly (to me), I found the link for the Kwajalein High School.

How interesting is this? We can see photos of Kwajalein high school... read about the beaches... see pictures of the weird little bubble housing that the Boeing families get... (paid for by the US Gov't!)... get e-mail addresses for all the faculty members... look at their calendar...

For a change of pace, why not trot on over to the site for the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site? Here we learn that RTS (short for the Reagan Test Site) "hosts a suite of unique instrumentation, located on eight islands throughout the Kwajalein atoll. This instrumentation includes a comprehensive suite of precision metric and signature radars, optical sensors, telemetry receiving stations, and impact scoring assets. RTS provides both mobile and fixed ground and flight safety instrumentation. With RTS's state of the art Mission Control Center and its vast range complex, the RTS sensors provide unparalleled capabilities to optimize ballistic missile & ballistic missile interceptor testing."

There's even a little button so you can see what the current weather is on "Kwaj." (When I posted this, the low today was projected to be 78, and the high 86 degrees F. You can even find out when the tides are.)

I really love the internet sometimes. Hours of good clean fun.