A welcome tip from Michael Lally...

"Muse" Rocks

Oh to be 17 again and in this crowd in Rome

Taking a hiatus...

I've decided to take a break from posting to this blog.  I'm not sure if anyone is even reading my posts, and I seem to have run out of gas and inspiration.  I'm making an entry on my calendar for September 1st make a status post to let you know whether I will resume posting.  In the meantime, I'm going to try to post more on Facebook where there seems to be a more active and consistent readership.

See you on September 1st ....

Off to Stinson Beach tomorrow

Today is Eileen's birthday.  Tomorrow we depart for four nights at the rental house, which is literally right on the beach.  It's the same place we rented last year for Eileen's birthday ... (Pictures below.) Can't wait to watch the whales pass by on their annual migration, as well as just relaxing and hanging out.  Back on Friday.

There are three units in this building:  A large unit on the ground floor with two upper units.  Look for the two windows on the upper right.  Those are the main windows of our unit where you can stand and see the whales pass by, or the people on the beach.  Last year I forgot my binoculars, which I am definitely not going to forget this time.

 
From the parking spaces in the rear.  Up those stairs to the front door to our unit.

In defense of grammar

While my previous post was interesting, I must admit that some of it was disheartening to me.  I'll admit it, I am an "old school" guy when it comes to the role grammar and punctuation should play in written content.  Thus it was a bit ironic that I should run across this blog entry by the author of a book about grammar.  His points are well-taken.

English language in constant flux

Check out this interesting article on how the English language is evolving.  

A promising new series on CNN

Check out the new CNN docuseries that explores how music and history harmonize --  "Soundtracks:Songs that Defined History."  It premiers tonight at 10:00 pm.  The first episode is on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Nina Simone is among those featured.

Butch Walker shines with Daryl Hall

A couple of weeks ago I checked out the episode of Live From Daryl's house featuring Butch Walker as the guest artist.  The show took place in late 2012.  The chemistry between Butch and Daryl is great throughout and the band feeds off both of them.  Of all the tunes they play, the one I keep coming back to for another listen is "Say It Isn't So."  It's up on YouTube these days so you can check it out right here.  Great rendition of a great Hall and Oates classic.  Enjoy and don't hesitate to comment.

10 amazing pictures ...

Check out these pictures.  Truly unique.

Daryl Hall & Grace Sewell

This season of Live From Daryl's house wrapped up a few weeks back, but until recently the last few episodes were not available on the web site.  Now they are all there, along with a lot of episodes from past seasons.  This season had a lot of great moments (more on that in posts to come) but my favorite was Grace Sewell's appearance.  This 19 year old Aussie is the real deal.  What I particularly enjoy about this episode is how Grace and Daryl and the band become more and more into the mood and music as they go along, until at the end it is clear that a genuine, and perhaps unexpected respect for each other has blossomed.  You can check out the show in very high quality video right here. If you have time, play the entire show, but you can play individual songs if you like.  I particularly like "Hell of a Girl" and "You Don't Own Me," but "Your Imagination" really rocks as well.

Enjoy...

Ah, the good old days...

You've probably noticed that I haven't posted anything lately.  Mainly, it was because I fell into the trap of watching too much news and getting more and more angry and depressed about what these evil, greedy, heartless bastards are doing to my country.  It is even worse that I thought it would be, and it's apparently going to keep getting worse.  It's all bad, but what they are doing to the EPA is unforgivable.  

Well, I decided I had to crawl out of my hole and at least make an appearance on my own blog. So, as long as I am out here in the open,  I will at least leave you with something from much happier days.  

Quote for today

Wise original quote from Tom Stienstra, the long-time outdoor writer for the San Francisco Chronicle:

"The odds of being born, according to one legend, are the same as if you were to throw a life ring on the open ocean, and at that exact moment, a blind sea tortoise poked its head through the ring.  The odds of dying, on the other hand, are 100 percent.  For each day in between, since it's a miracle you're alive in the first place, you'd best treat today as a blessing."

Back from Tahoe/Donner

We were up at the Tahoe/Donner house for a week.  There was already a ton of snow there when we arrived and it snowed more during several days of our stay.  I was going to go snowshoeing on the watershed land up above our place, but the plowed snow was do deep and high that I literally could not find a way out of our seven-unit compound to get up to the watershed land.  And, at some point it had rained and then froze, making the snow walls so hard that I could not even shovel an entry point!  So, I just hung out and did some binge watching, enjoying the Showtime offerings of "Narcos" and "Jessica Jones," and the Amazon production of "Mozart in the Jungle."  Good stuff.

Here are some photos that I took during our stay:

That's our unit on the right.  You can barely see the front door.

Our place from another angle.  The driveway is plowed and clear at the time of this shot, but the next day we got another 14 or 15 inches of snow, which had to be plowed.  The plow guys are running out of places to put the additional snow.

We are a bit worried about the snow load on the roof.  The forecast is for another foot or so of snow in the next few days, but we're cautiously confident that the roof will survive it.  These places were constructed to stand up against severe winter weather.

This shot was taken from out the window of the second story guest bedroom at about 3:00 pm.  It looks like a black & white photo, but it turns out that there was literally no color to be seen, even with the naked eye.  Pretty amazing.  You can see all the way down to the main road, and you can see the snow-covered power lines.  (Be sure to click on this one to blow it up)

The classics seem appropriate these days

I'm pretty cynical about how this whole Trump nightmare is going to play out, so I, (like many of my friends and acquaintances) am purposely avoiding too much exposure to bad, aggravating news.  It just ain't worth the old blood pressure ticking up a notch or two.  So I have been looking for mellow input that will give me some joy to balance out the woes.  To that end, I have been watching more classic movies than is my usual wont.  While  there may be better "classic" web sites that I have yet to discover, one that is elegant and very informative is "Classic Movie Favorites."  Check it out right here.  Enjoy.

Carl Sagan had a crystal ball!

The passage comes from Sagan’s book Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, first published in 1995:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

Sound familiar? 

Still here

I just realized that I have not posted since we returned from Tahoe.  I don't really have anything to say, except that the reality of Trump being sworn in in a couple of days is bumming me out.  Oh well, I do have the Warriors basketball team to cheer me up.  Don't give up on me.  I'll try to post more often.

Plenty of snow

Hello from Tahoe/Donner.  We got up here on Sunday and it started to snow that evening.  Then, it snowed all day Monday, all day Tuesday, and it's still snowing on Wednesday at at 5 pm as I write this.  So we're pretty much house bound.  Here are a couple of shots that I took at about noon today.  One is a view of a neighbor's house up the hill a bit, and the other is a view of our side deck.  Supposedly it will be finished snowing by tomorrow morning.  The snowshoeing should be excellent.

Sinatra could dance too!

Hey all.  We got up here to our Tahoe/Donner place at about noon yesterday.  The drive up was uneventful except for a stretch of pretty heavy fog.  Then, (per the forecast) it started snowing in the late afternoon and snowed all night.  As I look out the window now at around 9 am, I see that it is still snowing fairly hard with no let-up in sight.  Looks like some snowshoeing is going to be in order once the storm has passed.  I'll post some pictures later.

On the the main topic:  I was surfing the channels and ran across a showing of "That's Entertainment 2" and of course got hooked and ended up watching the entirety of what was left.  As part of that, I saw a number with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly from "Anchors Aweigh" wherein they sang a duet.  But what floored me was that about 1:40 into the number, they broke into a serious dance number with Frank coming amazingly close to dancing as expertly as Gene.  I never thought of Frank as a dancer, but he was terrific in this number. Fortunately, the whole thing is on YouTube.  You gotta check this out.  Leave a comment if you enjoyed it.