Introducing Tobiah

Tobiah is a very special lady with a very special spirit and an equally special talent. She's like a family member to us and we all just love her so much. She has one of the kindest hearts I've ever encountered, a lovely voice and a beautiful songwriting style.

Micah has just created a website fer her latest CD, Step Up. It would serve you well to go pay a visit. You can listen to it there and reserve a copy.

Congratulations on a beautiful CD Tobie!

Internet Addiction

(Click to enlarge)

A Friday Bullet List

I've decided that Friday shall henceforth be called, "Bullet List Friday". It makes sense. After blogging all week, Friday is a good place to channel all the runoff, thus giving you, my masochistic readers, a virtual leftovers post. Scraps, as it were. It won't be as torturous as it sounds. Trust me.

I can't promise you that I'll post a bullet list each and every Friday, but I do feel that I need to structure this blogging thing a little better in order to make my writing life easier to work around. It seems that all I do these days is write. There are my various blogs, comments on other people's blogs, my correspondence, my online historic portrayal, requests from people to write things, grocery lists, song lyrics, Facebook, my personal journal, and of course my trilogy. Gads! No wonder I can never find time to write!

~ Speaking of "can never", I find it really difficult to remember how not to / to not split my infinitives. Is it "can never", or "never can"? I've read the rule over and over, but I can never / never can remember it. Anyone out there have a little nursery rhyme clue like, "I after E, except after C"?

~ Do you ever have things happen that make you wonder if you're going crazy, or having a flashback? Our next-door neighbor is a drama and speech professor at the university. He only lives here during the school term and goes home to his wife and kids over school breaks, including summer. When he goes, he always leaves three lights on: the front porch, a small light in his dining room, and one in the kitchen. All day and all night these lights burn on, and they've been on now for the past three weeks. Last night at around 3:00 I went into the bathroom and noticed that none of those lights were on. It was pitch dark across our shared fence, so I pulled back the lace and looked around. Nothing seemed to be amiss--no noises, nothing. About an hour later I looked, and the three lights were back on. This made me wonder if I'd gone temporarily insane and imagined the whole thing, or if writing and reading so much about the Sixties caused me to have a flashback. Hey, I did my share of hallucinogens. I know that weird crap like that can happen years later. Actually, considering it's one of the oldest properties in town, it's probably haunted.

~ I guess Nettl and I are quasi-vegetarians now. We didn't mean this to happen, didn't even want it to happen, but here we are. When she was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery two weeks ago, we were instantly plunged into a new, healthy lifestyle to which I'm still adjusting. As the cook in the family I'm now having to plan my menus differently, shop differently and eat differently. But you know, I'd much rather give up red meat than lose her, so it's no sacrifice. In fact, we're both feeling better and losing weight, and that's not bad. Red meat doesn't even sound good to me now, and I really do prefer mineral water over soda. Mostly, we've cut out all unhealthy fats. I know that I don't have to follow this diet with her, but you do things for the ones you love. To be honest, I was kind of wanting a good reason to quit eating red meat anyway, and the moral issues just weren't there for me. I admit it: I'm an insensitive, unenlightened creep.

~ Sadly (for us), our dear friend Allen Scott (professor of music history), who received the Fulbright Award last week, will be spending the next year teaching at the university in Bratislava, Poland. Of course we're thrilled for him, but we're going to miss him terribly. He's become a member of our family. Add this to Lauren going to school in Bordeaux for the year and Micah probably moving to England, and it seems like everyone's going to Europe except us. It doesn't help that Bratislava is only 40 miles from Vienna. If we were living there we could still get together. And in such places! This isn't as sour grapes as it sounds. Really. I'm not bitter... Seriously, we'll miss everyone and we want them to have the time their lives. Just remember to bring me something when you come home.

~ Speaking of Allen, tomorrow he's having a backyard cookout and Madeline Kahn Film Festival. You have to know Allen to understand this. It looks like the whole gang will be there, which means that it'll be a rip roaring good time.

Have a great Weekend!

Freewheelin' Through the Village

I've written in the past how I always wished I'd been born in the right place and time to have experienced the Greenwich Village of the early-to-mid Sixties. Although I wanted to be a rock star, my true inspiration as a singer-songwriter came through folk music.

A little too young to immerse myself in the music of Phil Ochs, Odetta, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Ian and Sylvia (to name only a few), I found my true mentors in (also to name only a few) Bob Dyan, Donovan, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot. These were some of the first folk artists whose music legitimized the genre, thanks to Columbia Records' decision to sign Dylan.

Yesterday I read A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo. For those who are not familiar with her name, Rotolo was Dylan's girlfriend during his Village years and a little beyond. She is the woman pictured walking with him on the cover of his Freewheelin' album.

Oh, yeah. Her.

Due to the image the Beatles' girlfriends and wives carried--that of muse, supporter, and too often co-dependent--I have to admit that my impression of Rotolo was basically the same. Reading her book, however, has changed that, and for the better. Although the book has its flaws, it is written honestly and intelligently. Suze (pronounced Suzie) was (and is) an educated woman: an intellectual, an artist, and a feminist  and, raised in a politically active family, she was the perfect counterpart for Dylan. No simpering, clinging vine she!

Rotolo also inspired some of Dylan's best songs, my favorite being Ballad in Plain D.

I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze,

With the innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn;

I courted her proudly, but now she is gone,

Gone as the season she's taken...

Beneath a bare light bulb the plaster did pound,

Her sister and I in a screaming battleground;

And she in between, the victim of sound,

Soon shattered as a child to the shadows...

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,

"How good, how good does it feel to be free?"

And I answer them most mysteriously,

"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"

These are only verses one, ten, and thirteen.

Suze has a way with words that I really enjoyed. Her prose reveals a lot about her and makes it easy to understand that she and Dylan thought a great deal alike in those early years. My only real problem with the book is that she never seems to dip too far below the surface of any given subject or character description. She begins an anecdote then drops it to go to another. These short teases, as well as her tendency to repeat certain phrases and sometimes refer to Dylan by his full name after it's quite obvious that Bob and Bobby are indeed him, tend to make me think that she wrote down a lot of memories, only to string them together via a mental cut-and-paste. I would have enjoyed the book more had she tried to transition a little more seamlessly. Still, she shares so many memories and insights that I can't complain. She was there, she was a vital member of the Village community, and between her accounts and photos, I feel like I've traveled to a place and I time that has always fascinated me.

Her greatest talent is her ability to invoke feelings that I'd lost through the decades. For example, she describes the paranoia of the Cold War era in such a way that it all comes back to me as it was then, not as it is translated through hindsight.

It's a good book and one that I intend to buy and place on my shelf.


Ballad in Plain D © Bob Dylan 1964

Quiet, Cool and Well

It's amazing how soundproofed our little old cottage is. We live on a fairly busy corner in a smallish university town, so we get our fair share of muffler-deprived pickups, motorcycles, and cars with that boom-boom "music" playing so loudly that it sometimes rattles the pictures on the wall. But I never realized just how little of all this we actually heard until we were forced by a kaput AC unit to have our windows and doors open 24/7 for nearly a week.

More than the heat and humidity, the noise got to me, making me edgy, snappy, and generally rattled. Add the winds to that and I was about to jump out of my skin. I was even forced to take down the windchimes on the front porch because I just couldn't handle what they added to the incessant noise.

All that was rectified this morning when a repair dude installed the new AC unit behind the house. Now that the windows and doors are closed, it's quiet as can be in here. I can actually hear the sound of my fingers on the keyboard. Perhaps I'll be able to sleep a little better at night. I've enjoyed hearing the night birds, crickets and frogs, but to sleep with all the windows open unnerved me a little. Being from southern California with all the crime out there, I felt rather vulnerable and unsafe.

And now the house is cool, I'm feeling better since I cut my Thyroidzilla-Be-Gone dosage, and Nettl is well and feeling better every day. I think I can get back to writing my books.

At Last, the Twain Shall Meet

I've always been particularly proud of my family ties with Mark Twain. He was my great-grandmother's cousin and this reverence was passed down to me through a short line of women with a literary bent, namely my grandmother and my mother.

The first novel I ever read was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was eight years old and sitting on the front porch of our first house in Solvang when my mother put it into my hand, telling me that it was expected of me to always have a book in progress from that day on, and I was to start with one by our august relative. I did not disappoint. Even today I usually have no fewer than three books going at once.

Fortunately, I not only inherited this love of reading, I also inherited a love of telling a good story, and I became a writer. It didn't matter how many symphonies or chamber works I composed (music having come from my father's side of the family) my mother deemed my writing as vastly more important.

It was a strange game of tug-of-war my families played with me, pulling me from music to writing and back again. I guess writing about music is the perfect compromise; I've always thought of myself as both a musician and a writer. It just feels right for me.

Anyway, when my cousin died, he left some 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs, with strict instructions that they were not to be published until exactly 100 years had passed. Well, that time has come and in November the University of California at Berkeley, where the manuscript is kept in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's official autobiography.

"The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist." (Guy Adams)

I can't wait to get my hands on this treasure. I've of course read a number of biographies and "in his own words" compilations, but this will be unexpurgated Twain who has nothing to lose by telling us what he really thinks and feels. No prudish editors, no ladies' feelings to hurt, no delicate morality to offend, no reputation to uphold.

"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there." (Michael Sheldon)

He has, in fact, everything to gain: a definite place in the 21st century.

It's easy for me to imagine my deist, abolitionist, reincarnationist, feminist, freemason cousin taking a long drag on his cigar and giggling right about now, and I'm glad to be alive to find out why.

Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go

I'm so old that I don't remember Easy Bake Ovens. The only career orientation toys or games I remember is "Doctor" and "Post Office", and those weren't really about training me for a working adult life. Thanks to a Facebook friend I found these little gems.

Baby's First Cubicle. Sorry, I don't know what it's really called. I do know, however, that it includes a 160GB hard drive, 10/100 Ethernet, Microsoft Windows, a sound card and 2 external speakers, a surge protector, a 19" widescreen flat panel LCD monitor, custom Little Tikes Learning keyboard and Tiny Mouse, 1-year parts and labor, and bundled educational software. The cost is $2500.

It's designed to teach your child, but what it doesn't teach is not to spend $2500 on a computer with a 160GB hard drive. If you have to indoctrinate your baby for a boring future of sitting in the corporate jungle of cubicles, at least buy him or her a laptop. Yeah, this little investment will prepare your children for all the TPS reports they're going to be filing when they grow up and discover their lives are just as boring as Mommy and Daddy's were.

Of course, someone has to clean those cubicles and one day they'll be "laid off" when they no longer fit the corporate image (i.e. when they turn 35), so buy them this toy when the Cubicle toy has become as obsolete as they will be in a few years.

Notice that it's for "Girls Only"? With that kind of stereotyping, I'm surprised they didn't choose a black, hispanic, or asian girl to model for the package. Wait, maybe that girl is hispanic. If any of you live in Arizona, maybe you could profile her for me.

Alternate name for this toy: Middle Aged Barbie's Dream Job.

Not all kids will be able to afford college, so here's a toy for them.

Seriously, is this what parents are teaching their children today? To not only accept mediocrity as a viable life choice, but to actually anticipate it?

Excuse me, but life has gotten extremely effed up.

Back To It

I think that tomorrow, Monday, I'll be able to get back to my previous routine, which includes my daily blog entries and my daily blog rounds and comments.

But first...

Remember how I asked God, "What else?" Well, leave it to the Almighty to pick the most humid, muggy weekend to let the AC break down. Sheesh! I thought we'd left that all behind when we moved from the other house. I was so frustrated on Friday night that I wanted to bite someone's head off and crap down their neck. Instead, I'll call the landlord tomorrow, which means the AC guys will be told about the problem in the summer of 2012.

All the same, Allen came over last night and we all sat on the porch where it was no less humid, but definitely cooler. And this is only May.

Nathan, the last of our five kids graduated from high school today. Allen asked us if he was graduating magna cum laude, summa cum laude, or thank the laude. I'll let that one pass.

So tomorrow I'm getting back to my book. My characters are wildering in their plots and subplots and need me to come in and sort things out. I hope that you have fared better during my unofficial, unpredicted break.

Dear God, What Else!? Love, Steph

It was terrifying. Need I say more? Well, yeah, I should, since it was the most terrifying one and one-half hours of my life.

Around 6:00 pm a message was shouted out all across town on the city's siren system, telling us that there was a storm coming toward us that had a history of delivering tornadoes. They instructed everyone to seek shelter and that it would be over in about 30 minutes.

So we went outside to have a look, as did nearly everyone else in the neighborhood. Okies would rather stare a tornado down before they head for the cellar. The sirens went on at least 10 times, maybe more, but there was very little wind. The sky was dark, and in a short while we saw the wall cloud pass overhead, followed by a funnel cloud.

Down the street, an elderly gent brought out a lawn chair out and sat down facing west.

"When he goes in, I go in," I reasoned. He's probably seen a lot of these things and I trusted his judgment a lot more than the weather service, who didn't deem it important enough to update their radar maps online. Because we don't have TV, we rely on our computers for news.

Soon, another announcement was made, telling us that a tornado had touched down out at 6th and Country Club, which isn't far away. The wind suddenly hit us. The man took his lawn chair indoors and everyone else followed suit. All the while, the sirens were blowing. Then everything turned dark and deathly still. All we could do was listen and wait, and I felt like I was in WWII England, waiting for the Blitzkrieg. That's nerve wracking!

Later, after it was all over, we learned that the closest touchdown was at the university, only three blocks away. Immediately after the sirens went off we began to hear the sirens of emergency vehicles. That went on the rest of the evening. I heard the last one just a few minutes ago. The city trucks are still driving around, answering calls.

This is a link to the Stillwater News Press, where there is a short article and video.

I hope I never go through that again.

Oh, I forgot to mention that our house was in the middle of a flash flood last night. Our driveway is covered with debris, but we're lucky that our house is up off the ground a good two feet.

Can we have a little boredom now? Seems like the past two weeks have been one thing after another.
__________________________
UPDATE 11:12 am, Thursday:
We've learned that another one touched down just a couple of blocks on the other side of us. We were surrounded!

Virtual Winos

Sorry I've been a bit absent. The past week or so finally took its toll on me and I haven't been able to drag my sorry backside off of the bed. I'm not ill, just fatigued, so don't worry about me.

Lynette tried to go back to work on Monday, but came home, where she has stayed. She's going to try it again tomorrow. Other than that, she's doing really well.

While enjoying some R&R, we discovered the online game, My Vineyard. Man, is it ever fun. I mean, if you like beautiful graphics, an easy-going, mellow gameplay, and being able to interact in real time with other winos players. Of course, Ville, Nettl and I had to make it our own personal party place. It's kind of like a wine lover's holodeck, and everyone I meet says they wish they could live in there. Me too. The picture is a screen capture of Ville and me. (Click to enlarge.)

I think that tomorrow I'll be able to get back into the swing of real life--there's vacuuming and laundry to do, and a book I really need to finish writing.

And a blog that's feeling seriously neglected.

Alligators and Asses

It was one of those weeks that Allen described today as, "When the alligators are snapping at your ass."

You all know what went on, so I won't repeat myself. You don't want to read about it again and I certainly don't want to write about it. I'd rather just let it slither down the drain where it belongs.

Despite it all, Nettl and I kept our collective and personal cool and handled everything with a great deal of grace, I think. We didn't succumb to fear, anger, or frustration, and we treated every nurse, doctor and, in my case, Walmart pharmacy cashier, with respect, cheerfulness, and humor. I think we finally learned a huge secret about life, and we put it into practice. I do confess to falling apart this morning in anger over an insensitive, demanding client, but I didn't tell him to get stuffed for being such as ass although I told him we'd just barely lifted ourselves from a medical emergency. I threw a private tantrum, then took a nap. When I woke up I felt much better.

Speaking of feeling better, Nettl is recovering beautifully. She's hoping to go back to work tomorrow, but it's my hope that she will only spend half-a-day there. She has plenty of vacation time due her, but her supervisor has a fit whenever she tries to use it. In the three years she's been at that job, she's never used her vacation time for an actual vacation. The year before last there was something going on with the kids, and last year she used it so that we could move.

Allen dropped by today, leaving two-dozen beautiful yellow and white tulips. The three of us sat out on the porch for a while, talking. It was nice to have a friend come by and take our mind off of things for an hour. We both needed that.

After my thyroid calms down I'll be getting back to my writing. It feels like months since I last wrote anything.

Way to Go!

Just an entry to congratulate our dear friend, Dr. Allen Scott, for receiving the Fulbright Award. Allen has been invited to go to Poland as a guest professor (I can't remember the name of the university). He will be leaving in September and, although we will miss him tremendously, he has worked long and hard for these distinctions and deserves every good thing that is coming his way.

We became friends with Allen while Nettl was working on her masters degree; he not only was her Music History professor, he was the chair of her graduate committee.

Congratulations, Allen. We're very proud of you!

Happy Heimer Day!

I don't know how it happened, but things like this happen only once in a lifetime, if even that often. Each of these people was born on May 14th. Each of them are (were, in the case of the first one) about as weird and wonderful as it gets, and each of them I've been honored to call my friend.

The first is Steve Sogomonian, whose name was actually spelled Cteve or Cteev... I can never remember. Sadly, we lost him in 2000 or 2001... I can't remember that either because I lost three people all around the same time and parts of me shut down. Ville can tell you in the comments. Anyway, Steve was a born comedian, a giant pain in the ass, and I loved him dearly. No one could make me laugh like he did. As a matter of fact, "Heimer Day" was named after him. His nickname in our circle of friends was Stevenheimer, Ctevenheimer, or Cteevenheimer, depending on the spelling. It wasn't something we ever wrote down--it was spoken.

The second is Julie Chacon, AKA Ninja Mouse. Believe it or not, that cute little mouse held a black belt. One of my favorite conversations with her went exactly like this:

Julie: "I was just sitting at the bar, and he came up and we started talking. I punched him in the nose."

Me: "Why did you do that, Jules?"

Julie: "He said something that made me mad." 

Me: "I hope I never say something you don't like!" 

Julie: "You could never make me mad, Berg." 

It helps to know that Julie sounds a lot like Marge Simpson. Yeah. That cute little mouse. I wish I knew where Julie is; I really miss her.

The third is George Cullinan, AKA Geor3ge (he says the E is silent). George is a blazing genius, an intellectual, a brilliant concert pianist, and one of the weirdest damned people I've ever known. I'll never forget the night we got drunk together and sat singing Dylan songs. George could have been one of the original Pythons (of Monty Python) if he'd been born earlier and in England. He's that kind of weird and he's that kind of funny.

These are our Heimers. I miss each of them and I wish them each a happy birthday!

The Bed's Too Big

I think it was right about right this time ten years ago that Nettl came to Denver to live with me. The following August we moved to where we are now. That's approximately 3,640 nights, give or take, and of all of those we've spent only about twelve of them apart. Last night added to that number by one.

I was lonely, and I went to bed around midnight, waking up every hour and-a-half. Then, a great thunder storm rolled in and lulled me into some pretty good sleep until 4:30. I have to get up at six anyway, so here I am.

Nettl's surgery is scheduled for 8:00 this morning. I'll tag an update to the bottom of this post when she's safely out. She's already up. She left the following message on Facebook:

"It's four in the A.M. I've been resting pretty well considering that I'm in the hospital. Antibiotics have kicked in because my fever's gone and I'm feeling much better! Let's get this thing yanked out!"

More later...
________________________________

UPDATE 1:35 pm:
One of the concerns was that the doctor was pretty certain Nettl's gallbladder was so bad that he might have to make a full abdominal incision to remove it rather than use the usual laparoscopy method. The bad news was that the infection was so extensive that if we'd waited much longer, she could have been in danger of peritonitis, or even liver failure. The good news is that the laparoscopy worked. This means that her recovery period will be a matter of days rather than weeks and she will most likely go home tomorrow. What does all this mean? It means everything is good and that it all turned out perfectly. When she came out of recovery, she was chatty and happy. She's napping now, so I think I'll take this opportunity to do the same.

Thank you, all, for your friendship. It means so much.

Blog Lite, Plus an Update

Sorry for the gaps between posts. Nettl's really ill and I just don't have the energy or the inclination to post. She's scheduled to see the surgeon on Friday, but I may have to take her to the emergency room again today.

I promise I'll write something soon.

UPDATE 6:20 pm:

Surgery has been scheduled for 8:00 tomorrow morning. It may be more entailed than we originally thought. Please keep up the prayers and positive thoughts that only a laparoscopic procedure will be necessary and not a full abdominal opening.

Calling Dr. Gallstone!

I've seen a couple of these in the past twelve hours and there are still a few more to go before the fortnight is up. This is one of the waiting areas at our local hospital.

Last night, after a wonderful Mothers Day, Nettl began experiencing terrible upper abdominal pain. After a couple of hours I took her to the emergency room, where it took two doses of some chalky stuff, an oral pain killer, and two injections to ease the pain. They sent her home with some Darvocet and we went to bed exhausted and expecting a phone call from the hospital to wake us up.

When it came, I was already up. Nettl, who was still spinning from the drugs, scheduled an ultrasound. I ran around the house collecting all of the financial statements we needed to submit (we have no health insurance), and we went to the hospital. When she came out of the ultrasound, she had a picture of an inch-long gallstone, and she called a recommended surgeon to schedule an appointment. She can't get in to see him until Friday.

Meantime, I'm wondering what I can cook for her this week. She found a website and it looks like she's restricted to fish and avocados. I mean, there's more, but the list of what she can't have is huge!

Off to the store...

A Week of Voracious Reading

In the past four days I've gobbled up three books, Clapton  the Autobiography by Eric Clapton, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller, and Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles.

Feeling a bit under-educated about the early blues movement of the late Fifties and early Sixties in England, I checked out the Clapton book as research for my trilogy. England's roots of Rock and Roll are completely different than ours here in the States and I felt I needed to submerse myself in that history. My main character comes out of it after all. Not only did I learn all I need to know (and from the master himself) I came to respect Clapton for more than the great guitarist he is, I closed his book filled with deep respect and great affection for him as a human being.

The book is so well written and is so candid; he faces himself and all of his inner demons with courage as he pins himself and his life under that penetrating gaze of his. Throughout the book he is a gentleman; while he treats himself and his past actions with his relatively newfound, unflinching standards, he handles people in his past with dignity and forgiveness. I sense that he has forgiven himself as well.

If you choose to read any of these books it should be this one. There's a kind of trailer (as well as a short interview with Clapton about it) on the Amazon website linked above.

The second book was good, but after reading Clapton's, the bar had been raised a bit. I'll admit that I checked it out purely for the chapters about Joni Mitchell; I've never been a Carly Simon fan and, although I have tremendous respect for Carole King as a songwriter beyond compare and her role in American music, I've just never been a fan.

Still, I learned a lot about all three of these women, and I particularly liked the architecture of the book. The voice seemed to be a little stilted at first, but that's probably because I still had Clapton's voice in my head. As I read, that became less noticeable.

Pinning down a woman like Mitchell could not have been easy--she has always shifted and metamorphosed like a wisp of incense in the breeze--but Weller accomplishes this beautifully. You sometimes like Mitchell and sometimes you don't, but you always feel her plight as a woman in a male-dominated field, and her eternal fight with her own inner demons. She is a fascinating human being.

It was especially fun for me to read about my own past--Joni and I skirted around each other unknowingly in the early Seventies, although we never met. Those of you who read this blog know to what I am referring.

I actually read the third book first. When I first read it a year or so ago it was just for the read, but I checked it out a second time because I remembered there was a lot of information about "Swinging London" in it. I got so much more out of it this time and I came to respect  McCartney in a way I didn't before, which came as a big shock to me.

There is so much more to him than Beatle history likes to let on; I'd never considered him an intellectual or a well-rounded man of the arts until this read, and for that I apologize; he's always been presented, as he says, "as the idiot Beatle" (I can tell you first-hand that he's not the empty-headed mop top that he's been made out to be). He was actually getting into art-oriented things in 1964 that John Lennon didn't get into until 1968. In those early London years he was friends with such notables as Bertrand Russell, Noel Coward, Rene Magritte, and many other writers, philosophers and painters. He attended the theatre more than he did the clubs, and he sat around formal literary salons more than he did houkahs. In a way, it was easy for me to picture him being from another time, sharing ideas with Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and  Dante Rossetti. This was an image of Paul that I'd never seen before, and I liked it.

Although not an autobiography, this book contains full pages by Paul. The author is an old friend, after all, and he spent a great deal of time interviewing him for it. I went into the book half-expecting Paul to steal the limelight from his fellow Beatles, especially John, but he doesn't. He goes through many of their hit songs, describing how each was written and giving percentages of who wrote what--so much percent John's contribution and so much his own. He does this fairly, unafraid to say when he had absolutely nothing to do with a Lennon-McCartney composition, and actually giving Yoko her due when it's appropriate.

Like Clapton, McCartney has learned to forgive both himself and others. I only wish a new edition would be released that covers the deaths of Linda (his wife of nearly 30 years) and of George Harrison. I was left feeling like I knew the tragedies that lay ahead, and I wanted to warn him. Such is the nature of literary time travel.

3 New Pix on Ernie's Tribute Blog

Click the image to see three great new pix.

So That's Where the Rum Went

In January, Disneyland, in Anaheim, California began draining the Rivers of America, a large circular river that is home to The Columbia ship (left), the Mark Twain paddle steamer, and the canoes and keel boats that take passengers across to Tom Sawyer's Island.

It hasn't been drained, cleaned and overhauled for seven years, so you can imagine the fun the workers probably have finding things that people have lost in the water. Seven years ago, the strangest things they found were a toaster and a bottle of rum.

This year, among the things they found were half of a canoe from Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoe ride, plastic swords, Mardi Gras beads, hundreds of cell phones and walkie talkies, hundreds of baby pacifiers, Mickey "mouse ear" hats, sunglasses, and a PC processor tower. These are all pretty predictable, except the half a canoe (didn't someone notice that half of one was missing? Hope there were no people on board when it went down) and the computer. That had to be an inside job -- some disgruntled park employee.

So far, they've never found a body, but they did find koi from the moat around Sleeping Beauty's castle. The going explanation is that the ducks get the roe stuck to their cute little webbed feet, then fly to the rivers, where they hatch.

Reading the comments on the original story (link below), I've learned that there are a lot of things found in the river that aren't released to the public. Alligators, watches, jewelry, etc. And in 2003 they found a bowling ball.

The treasure from 2003 was much more fun. Shoot! I'd sneak a bottle of rum into the park just to chuck it in for someone to find later! Makes me wonder, though, how much all the coins they found added up to. I should think it was quite a haul.

Hat Tip to HorusJ for this story.

Source (There be pictures, matey!)

Repercussions

B.E.Earl has asked us to make a list of things we'd do if there weren't any repercussions to worry about. His list is pretty cool, and it got me to thinking. Here's what I've come up with at 4:30 in the morning.

1.  Like Earl, I'd stay in the sun until I got a tan, or what any natural redhead can expect to get as a tan. No burning, no peeling or blistering, no skin cancer, no wrinkling.

2.  I'd drink white wine instead of soda. I love the flavor of wine, and if they made a non-alcohol wine that tasted like real wine, I'd drink it, but to have the real thing without having to think about alcoholism, cirrhosis of the liver, barfing, and getting hangovers, would be great.

3.  I'd over-indulge in dairy products. 'Nuff said.

4.  I'd get a dog. I'd also install a pet door and fence the yard.

5.  I'd live like I did when I was in my 30s.

6.  I'd have a rum and coke. I miss that.

7. I'd sit crosslegged on the floor all the time like I used to do.

I can't think of anything else. What would you do?


The photo is by Liza Crowley Jusdon.

Sunday Afternoon

A cute flower pot of miniature roses on a cute, old-fashioned front porch, my favorite "room" in our house! And now, Nettl is grilling some steaks. Ah, Sunday!

We've worked hard this weekend, Nettl, Joel and myself. And that Corona? I'm going to go back to it right now.