Private (self-destructing) note

Even if you are not the guy handing out assignments to the Mission Impossible crews, this may come in handy at some time in the future.

~ ??

Presidential approval ratings

I have been reading some comments on other blogs wherein right-wing trolls are smugly claiming that President Obama’s approval ratings are in the toilet and thus he is the worst president in modern times, will be a one-term president, etc. 

Well, here is a terrific site to disprove all this hogwash.  Note that in the first part, “Current President Barak Obama” the polls are  listed in reverse chronological order, and that as of February of this year all the listed polls show that Obama’s approval rating is higher than the disapproval rating.  And, note that among those polls is Fox News, which gives him 51% approve, 43% disapprove, and 6% “other.”

Then scroll down to the cool graphs and click on Ronald Regan, and you will see that after two years in office his approval rating was only 35%!  The graphs for the other presidents are also very interesting.  Bush Junior got the high ratings in the first years of his presidency because of 9/11, and finished under 40%, having dipped below 30% just months before his term ended.  By the way, the graphs are a bit confusing with respect to disapproval percentage.  For the disapproval percentage you have to read the scale from the top and treat the 100% line as zero, 90% as 10% and so on.  It took me a while to figure that out.

The guy who is fascinating is Clinton.  Click on his graph and you will see that his approval rating was well over 50% from early 1996 until the end of his presidency.  Mind you, this was in the face of constant trashing by the right wing haters and a full-blown impeachment!  Amazing.

Huge kudos for “The Adjustment Bureau”

It is storming and very, very windy today in the Tahoe region.  The ski resorts were all either closed or on “wind hold” so we went to Reno to catch the 11:30 am showing of “The Adjustment Bureau,” projected digitally. 

This the best movie I have seen in a while.  In my mind everything about it is perfect. 

• Cast:  Not even one miscast actor.  The leads, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have some of the best screen chemistry I’ve seen.  The main Adjustment Bureau cats are perfect and include the great John Slattery from “Mad Men” and the incomparable Terence Stamp – also an actor I’m not familiar with, Anthony Mackie who plays “Henry.”
• Love story:  Every review I have read notes that this is one of the best love stories to come along in a while.  I heartily agree.  I admit I was tearing up in places and my wife gave me a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek at one point.
• Script:  Snappy and intelligent.  Best of all is that unlike a lot of sci-fi stories, they did not bog down the plot with “talking head exposition.”  Instead they worked the exposition into the plot a little at a time so that you hardly noticed it, but on the other hand you don’t leave the theater saying to yourself, “what was that all about?”
• Production:  Top of the line direction, cinematography, and design.  Digital projection was an added plus.
• Music:  Original music by Thomas Newman who also did the music for Wall-E, Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty and tons of other films and TV shows.  The music is very effective in this movie as you will see.
• Story:  Hey, it’s Philip K. Dick, need I say more.  You will be on the edge of your seat a lot of the time wondering what comes next and savoring it when it comes.

Tom says five out of five stars.  Go see it.

Gas prices & corporate welfare...

Wow, I did not realize that I had not posted on my own blog for a while. I have been writing fairly long comments on other blogs so I have neglected by own.

Anyway, we are back up at the Tahoe/Donner place for a week's vacation. We got here on Friday and we don't have to go home until Sunday!

While we were driving up on Friday we had to stop for gas. The price per gallon? $4.07 for regular. This gets my blood boiling. These tea party party people and the right wing are forever pushing to cut welfare for the poor and disadvantaged who truly deserve it. Yet, they defend (or at least ignore) the huge subsidies that we, that's right WE the tax-payers, shell out to the oil companies. Of course these are the same companies charging over $4.00 a gallon for their product. How can this be justified?

On a more mellow note, I went out snowshoeing the other day after another snow storm. It was cloudy and cold, but truly stunning. Here is a photo I shot that proves it.

Late February snow storm

We took off for our Tahoe Donner place on Thursday at about 2:30 pm, just ahead of a snow storm forecast.  It caught up with us just as we started to head up the pass.  That meant some white-knuckle driving at 25 mph, but we made it in and up the driveway and into our garage at about 7:30 – five hours for what usually take a little over three hours.  It snowed very hard all that night and all day Friday, so we did not get out of the house to go skiing.  It would not have made any difference because almost all the ski resorts did not open because of gale-force winds.  We ski at Squaw Valley USA, and the winds over the ridge tops there were clocked at well over 100 mph!!

We got out today, and got some nice skiing in but because it was a Saturday after a big storm, every powder hound within  300 miles was there.  Too crowded for my tastes.  Anyway, when I got back this afternoon I took some pictures to show you how much snow fell on us:

This is a shot from above our place, which shows that the snow is up to our first story.  The pickup belongs to a neighbor and it broke down a couple of weeks ago.  He still hasn’t been able to get it started.  Obviously the plow had to work around it.

This shot shows the front of our place and when you are looking out that lower window you cannot see above the snow!

Another shot of the ill-fated pickup.

Bob Parlocha gets well-deserved kudos

Is seems to me that most people will tell you they are from somewhere.  It’s the place of their roots, the area on earth where they feel grounded and most fulfilled.  Me, I’m a west-coast boy, specifically the San Francisco Bay Area.  Where ever I go, I always get that sweet, comforting  feeling when I return to my home in Alameda on San Francisco Bay. I spent some time in Europe and on the East Coast, and enjoyed it, but my soul was always ready to fold up the tent and return home. 

Part of “home” here in the Bay Area is Bob Parlocha.  We used to have a renowned jazz station here, KJAZ, and Bob was one of the best DJ’s on that station.  I listened to him and the sounds he played for all the years I was “home.”  KJAZ shut down in 1994 because of the money woes of its rich owner who had lovingly run it at a loss for many years.  But KCSM, a public radio station in San Mateo County filled the void and went to an all-jazz format, where it remains today.  Parlocha continued his “Dinner Jazz” program under KCSM’s auspices.

So I was pleasantly surprised today to find this article/interview in today’s SF Chronicle.  It turns out that Parlocha is recording his show in a garage studio in at his home in Alameda,  sending it to WFMT in Chicago via the Internet, where they download it to CDs and then upload the program to satellite. Then the satellite beams it to some 260 stations around the world. A number of stations put it online, including KCSM.

This revelation made me all warm and fuzzy because I live in Alameda too!  In all these years I don’t recall ever seeing a picture of Parlocha, so who knows, I may have walked by him dozens of times in the local Safeway store, or more likely one of the coffee places like Peets at the corner of Park St. and Central Ave. in Alameda.  If that happened I can assure you that he was not speaking during those moments because I would recognize his voice anywhere.  Now that I have recent pictures of him from today’s article/interview I’m going to be on the lookout for him!

If you are interested in hearing him and the music he plays for you tune into this station from 12am – 6am or 6pm – 12am; just click on the “Listen Live” button.   Or you can start here.

I’ll close with Bob’s terrific answer to the last question in the interview:

Q: What one CD would you take with you?

A: "Giant Steps" by John Coltrane. It came at a time (1960) when the door was open and my mind was seeing the universe.

Where are the Smiths? (as in “tune” and “word”)

On occasion I hear “main-stream” FM radio and I have realized that virtually all of the popular artists are singing songs that I call “slab compositions,” a term I have coined myself for lack of a better identifier. What seems to be going on is that composers (even some of the better singer/songwriters) just take a bunch of chord changes and then sing only notes that fall in the chord and what comes out is this “slab” of a song. If you want a sample of what I am talking about, just check out “The Pulse,” channel 26 on Sirius/XM satellite radio. And, the lyrics, when sung in this monotonous, often-single note repetition, come out boring and lifeless. (I actually can write one these type songs pretty easily by just getting out my guitar and working out a nice chord sequence and then simply singing some notes that fall under the hand).

The problem is that we have pretty much lost the tunesmiths and the wordsmiths these days, at least in pop and modern rock. It’s difficult and tricky to write really cool tunes that don’t come out as simple slabs, and it’s just as hard to write lyrics that have some soul and zest yet aren’t corny or cheesy. I could give you a hundred examples “the real deal,” ranging from pretty much anything Paul Simon wrote more than 10 years ago (“American Tune” is sheer genius) to the songs from most of the great traditional musicals (“I Loves You Porgy” indeed). But one example that just popped into my head as I was thinking about this was this:

“And if you should survive to 105
Think of all you’ll derive out of being alive
And here is the best part
You’ll have a head start
If you are among the very young at heart.”

Of course this is from the great song “Young at Heart” written by Carolyn Leigh, lyrics, and Johnny Richards, tune, popularized by Sinatra in the mid-fifties and covered hundreds of times by other artists, including of late none other than Tom Waits!

Perhaps I will weigh in further on this subject in later posts with actual links to the music I am discussing, but that will have to wait for another day.

~ Tom of the young at heart