June 15, 2006
The Humble Stumble goes to (SpringFest)
Roy Schneider’s alter ego in his comic strip The Humble Stumble is a finalist in the songwriting competition at “Squirrelfest,” which is in turn the alter ego of our beloved Suwannee SpringFest
The adventure is under way. First strip in the story line is here.
P.S. The dog in the strip is named Grisman!
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March 19, 2006
Groucho's Sunday
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February 21, 2006
More photos from the southwest
I’m safe at home after a delightful two week tour/vacation in my favorite part of the universe. I attended the Southwest Popular Culture Association meeting with a gang of Deadhead academics; gave performances in venues ranging from a beautiful adobe house to a rowdy bar; and spent four days at the Grand Canyon with my wife, Rita.
Thursday, February 16, was an eventful day in many ways: Rita and I hiked 4.6 miles down the Bright Angel Trail to Indian Gardens, and then of course we had to hike back up. An hour or so after completing that 7-hour adventure, I was onstage in the bar at the Bright Angel Lodge, singing for an audience of tourists, cowboys, and Xanterra employees. Along the way my digital camera and my iPod stopped working (I’m assuming this was related to the near-freezing temperatures, but I’m surprised and annoyed by both problems) and I thought I lost my cell phone. I was afraid to even utter the words “powerbook,” “laptop,” or “computer,” lest that essential device also go bye-bye. But the phone turned up in the back of the Subaru that night, and the computer continues to function perfectly.
The Forester started making a rubbing noise on the drive home Sunday. I just learned that the bearings on both rear wheels need replacement. Sigh.
Here are some photos (by Rita and by me) from our Grand Canyon sojourn. There are more images from this trip and other visits to the region in the “southwest” gallery on my flickr page.
Extra special thanks to Rosie McGee for making our Grand Canyon visit such a pleasure.
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February 18, 2006
Rita Meets Mr. Bighorn
Rita and I crossed paths with this handsome fellow on the Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon on Thursday, February 16. We’ve got a lot of photos from this trip on flickr.com
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Have a Bagel on Biff
Biff’s Bagels in Flagstaff, Arizona - named in honor of a sweet dog named Biff. The whole place is festooned with dog photos. Fine bagels, fabulous homemade granola.
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December 14, 2005
Best news story of the year
Daring rescue of whale off Farallones
On the front page of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, the amazing story (by the excellent Peter Fimrite) of a brave humanitarian act.
A humpback whale was discovered by fishermen trapped in a tangle of crab pot lines and struggling for her life. A rescue party cut her loose - and the whale, obviously understanding what they were doing, held still while they worked and then made what appear to be several gestures of gratitude.
At least 12 crab traps, weighing 90 pounds each, hung off the whale, the divers said. The combined weight was pulling the whale downward, forcing it to struggle mightily to keep its blow-hole out of the water…. Moskito and three other divers spent about an hour cutting the ropes with a special curved knife. The whale floated passively in the water the whole time, he said, giving off a strange kind of vibration. “When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me,” Moskito said. “It was an epic moment of my life.”
“It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we had helped it,” James Moskito, one of the rescue divers, said Tuesday. “It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun.”
Read the whole story, please. And look at the photos.
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December 13, 2005
"Spring" cleaning
After two weeks of getting nothing done due to illness, I got my energy back in a major way and I’ve been on a cleaning and throwing-away binge for days.
It started with the t-shirts in my bedroom closet. They’re on shelves, and the shelves were just a jumble of knotted, crumpled fabric. So I pulled every damn shirt down and tossed out more than a hundred of them. I also reduced by stash of sweatshirts from a dozen to four, deleted a few shirt-type shirts, threw away a pair of jeans w/ a loose button that I’ll never get replaced, and tossed several pairs of shorts and some worn-out socks.
Then I went into my office, aka entropy city. I’ve been at it for days in there. I have been accumulating sheets of cardboard and corrugated paper for decades, just in case I needed to mail something. I’ve got letterhead from jobs I left 25 years ago and magazines I wrote for 20 years ago; magazines with Something About Me in ‘em that I needed multiple copies of (why? elephino!); computer cables for interfaces that have been obsolete for a decade; nonfunctional digital tape recorders; documentation for software I replaced years ago; software I haven’t used since I had a black and white monitor; a basket full of rubebr stamps that my dear deceased business manager loved to use but which i haven’t touched since she went on sick leave and never came back.
I’ve had books stuffed into shelves all over the place, in among the cassettes and VHS tapes, with no rhyme or reason; CD racks that hold two dozen disc, whose contents would all be more appropriately stored with the larger collections; little wire baskets full of nothing in particular; a couple hundred Priority mail labels with my return address printed on them, which I haven’t used in years; a stash of labels for the postage meter I returned two years ago; a big cardboard rack with 32 compartments - designed to hold stacks of letter-size paper - more than half of which were filled with nothing in particular.
For twenty years now I have been printing extra copies of the cue sheets for my radio show and storing them in one or more of those compartments. Once or twice a year I’d take a hundred or so of the oldest sheets and move them over into the compartment that held printed-on-one-side paper that I can use for printing nonessential documents (e.g. WELL topics to read in the bathtub). I’ve got reels of tape that belong to other people, the contents of which I’ve already digitized and burned to CD for them, but for some reason I haven’t returned the reels.
I found an ancient box containing the floppy discs and documentation for Microsoft Excel, which I haven’t used on any of my computers in probably five years.
You get the picture?
I have already filled up the trash can and the recycling bin, and we took half a cubic yard of t-shirts, sweaters, etc. to various charitable outlets on Sunday.
I now have a thousand sheets of printed-on-one-side paper ready to reuse. I will from now on only print enough cue sheets to meet my needs; it occurs to me that this computer I have in my lap has the entire 20-year run of the show for on-demand printing should the need arise.
I have collected all the books from all four corners of the office and stacked them on top of the filing cabinets, where the behemoth paper- compartment thingie dominated the room for a decade. I will organize the books by various appropriate criteria and take about a third of them over to KPFA when I go in to do my show; I will leave them in the lobby, and most of them will be gone by the time I leave the building two hours later. I will put some of the bound galleys of Grateful Dead-related books up for sale on eBay and give some of the proceeds to Rock the Earth and to a friend of mine who lost her job and her health insurance just as she began being treated for cancer.
I’m in the process of retrievinng all the posters and photos from their dusty sanctuaries behind bookcases, in closets, and over there by the printer. I may try to sell some of the David Lance Goines posters I bought in the ’80s. I may try to sell some of the Herb Greene and Jim Marshall photos I have accumulated over the years. I’ve put up a few collectibles on eBay, and there will be many more in the weeks to come.
There’s more.
I haven’t said a word about the CDs, which are far and away the biggest problem.
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