QUOTESSAYS

  Another bad guy that lived on the periphery of outlaw legends and never quite got his due. Plus John Joshua Webb was the perfect example of the 'white hat/black hat' syndrome so common back in the wild west, where 'Rule of Law' was merely a suggestion. Webb was born in Keokuk, Iowa in 1847, the 7th of 12 children. The family moved all over and eventually Webb left home and became a buffalo hunter as a teenager. He drifted all over the west, hitting all the gunfighter hot spots of the day. After hanging out in Deadwood, SD and causing some trouble, he ended up in Dodge City, KS and that is where he first shows up historically in the paper as a well respected lawman. He was deputized by Bat Masterson and rode with Wyatt Earp in chasing bad guys all over the territory. He outgunned and arrested 'Dirty Dave' Rudabaugh, one of Billy the Kid's buddies, single handed. He later became a hired gun for the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad in their battle wit

 Me and my buddy Melissa's movie this week was 2020's "I'm thinking of ending things", the most existentially surreal movie we have seen to date. It clocks in a bit long at a little over two hours and you can feel that at times, but it held up and kept us interested and off balance the whole way. It came off kinda like a college educated horror movie with a lot of literary and cultural references that only a smarty pants would catch. It definitely had a "look at how smart and clever I am" vibe to it, but hey, the writer and director are definitely smarter and cleverer than I am. I ain't living the high life and moving and shaking in Hollywood. I knew it was gonna be a pretty arty film when I saw the title all written in lower case, always a sure sign. But it worked as a psychological horror film, was spooky, and was still a very good movie. The acting and filming technique was superb all the way around and contained enough sly and subtle humor to put

  Werner passed on at the Facility early Friday evening. He was a WW2 vet, but what made him unique was he was a German soldier. It was always fun to hear him talk with the other American WW2 vets. They enjoyed each other's company immensely. His wife and him were childhood sweethearts in Dusseldorf before the war. He promised to come back and marry her after he got out of the army. They picked out a beautiful old stone church for the ceremony they had both attended as children. He fought, and as he said, " was chased all over Europe, from France to Berlin. " Werner was eventually captured and placed in an American POW camp. He and 4 others escaped, and he made his way 300 miles back home to Dusseldorf, hiding out in the woods and traveling at night, to find his true love. The city was bombed out, her house obliterated. He eventually found her in a refugee camp a month later, a little bruised and bloody, but still alive. They got married in the rubble of the church the da

  Donald Trump is a misogynistic, billionaire felon. Here’s why Americans can’t stop voting for him (msn.com) Not one for much political posting on Facebook, but I must admit this presidential election cycle fascinates me. It is stirring up the lost and dead soul of the earnest political science major I was at UCSC before the cynicism set in when I began to realize how it really all worked. It is the same attraction as the compulsion to look at a multi-car crash when driving by to see if you can spot any bodies. So be prepared, I may turn into a Heather Cox Richardson on crack, aka using way too many words to explain a political position. I can't ever recall being more repulsed or repelled on a primal level to any public figure more than I have to Donald Trump through the years, even way before he became a politician. Add to that him ripping off my mentally helpless brother for a couple of grand in his bogus 'Trump University' real estate course and that hit me on a persona

  Ray Kurzweil: The world isn't getting worse — our information is getting better – GeekWire There is much truth to Ray's thesis here. Every age comes with positives and negatives, but I quite happy and content to be born when and where I was in history. Not too long ago I would be a very lucky man to make it to 73 relatively hale and hearty. And I love having the knowledge of the world at my fingertips 24/7. Now no one can predict the future, but in my case that issue becomes more academic with each passing day.

 As twisted and entertaining as this story is, the real important part is at the end. A Professor of laboratory science at the University of Connecticut could be missing for months and the wife was still cashing his checks? And the guy whose job was to oversee that is making over 300k per year? How does a professor not show up for work for months and still get paid? Bureaucracy in action.  Wife was convicted of killing her husband in violent hammer attack. She was found dead hours before sentencing (yahoo.com)

  Jerry Miller Dead: Moby Grape Guitarist Was 81 (variety.com) I am not one to mourn and make a big deal over an old rock star's death. There are too many to keep up with lately with the 60's and 70's class hitting the wall. But Jerry Miller holds a soft spot for me. He was part of my youth in Santa Cruz, CA where he was a fixture in the local music scene for years in a series of bar bands after his brief flirtation with real fame ended with the self-demolition of the Moby Grape. One of the most surreal nights of my life started at a Rhythm Dukes show at the Opal Cliffs Inn, aka the OD Inn, in 1972, but that will be a story in itself someday, maybe. I may have to wait until all the witnesses are dead, and we are getting close. I know a few of my FB Friends share memories of Miller too, and even played with him on occasion. My second wife worked with his wife at the phone company, and my best friend from back in the day bought his amp that he used all through the Grape's

  Facebook Part 2 of 'Idiocracy' remake. Oops, they tell me its real! We are decaying so fast you can see the glow!

 My buddy Melissa and I watched "Old Henry" for our 2021 movie pick this week. It comes from the same school of Westerns as Clint Eastwood's "Outlaw Josey Wales" and "The Unforgiven", that being gunslingers who reached middle age, changed their ways, became family men, and then are forced by circumstance to unpack their guns again and do a heap of killing for our enjoyment. Only in this case it is Billy the Kid and exploits the many tall tales that abound that he was never killed by Par Garrett on that fateful night in Fort Sumner, NM. Being a Billy buff, I picked up in the first few scenes as to who he was supposed to be. Tim Blake Nelson did a fine job as a 40 something Billy and was a perfectly aged version of the one verified photograph of the Kid. An indie film that is beautifully filmed and paced. So many of the frames could be a painting. Brings home the hardships of life in the Oklahoma Territory in the early 1900's too. As a newly minted g

  The Democrats have a clear choice for their next presidential candidate: Jimmy Carter. He is experienced, rested, and ready to go. I am sure he could hold his own against Trump at the level of the debating we have witnessed in the last couple of election cycles. I hear Jimmy hasn't been conscious the last few months, but that has not proven to be an obstacle to a presidential run as of late.

  Overcome Stress By Visualizing It As A Greedy, Hook-Nosed Race Of Creatures (youtube.com) In lieu of not having a or watching regular TV, I have become a fan of The Onion's 'Today Now' with Jim and Tracy. It is truly a spot-on parody of all those chirpy, cheerful morning network magazine type shows with nauseatingly irritating hosts. I can only stand to be entertained in less than two minutes intervals now or I lose interest. Porn clips have rewired my brain.

  A little over 40 years ago I was waiting for my security supervisor's spot to open at the ABC-TV Television Center. In the meantime the guard company sent me to this building for a couple of weeks to tie me over with a job. This non-descript edifice was the Bank of America Data Center at 1000 West Temple in downtown LA. I just asked to be put on a key run and left alone. The middle 3 floors that you see with the covered windows here were where the computers were. There were rows and rows of them on all 3 floors running constantly. One of my jobs was to keep checking the temperature of the rooms. It was incredibly hot. Hundreds of computers, each the size of a big fridge. I am betting my computer pro buddies Jeff and David could tell me what they were running in '78. I am sure they could put it all on one smart phone these days. I had only worked in the entertainment division and this was mighty boring. I did get my personal taste of "Me Too!" here though. The site

  USA! USA! USA! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 #hulkhogan #america #sidebyside | idiocracy | TikTok We have finally arrived at becoming a full fledged 'Idiocracy'....

  You can never have too much knowledge! I remember a childhood friend, Kevin, who could fart on command. I don't mean squeakers either, but full spectrum butt trumpets. To 8-year-old boys that was like being a God.... 20 things to know about farts (msn.com)

  Facebook At the facility there is a little cabinet with glass doors outside every room where one can put photos and mementos of the patient in that particular room. It also serves as a clue to where their rooms are when they are out in the hall. But another huge value is you can see what these people looked like in their physical prime. I will often linger there and soak that up before I deal with them. Many see themselves as their young selves too. They cycle in and out of the present. Why wouldn't they, the present isn't very nice. It helps me to see them as real people that once had hopes and dreams, had real lives, not just old folks dying. That can make all the difference in this job.

  War and Peace - Our World in Data I tend to be an optimist. I think we are kept in a continual state of hyperbole to throw us off balance in many ways, one from the '1984' playbook. Keeping us divided makes for easier control. We have many problems. We always have had too. But, globalization, be it good or bad, is probably going to tone down massive violent physical wars pretty much from here on out. We are too interconnected these days, both economically and technologically. As I have said before, I am an Apocaloptimist. I believe everything is going to shit, but it will all turn out OK anyway.....

  Mr. P.passed a few days ago at the facility at the age of 93. He just fell down and died. I waited to write this until I could talk with his son. I had even brought him up here before as a guy I never really worked with. His wife had asked me too, but when I checked in on him I realized it was too late for me to be of much help. The spouses are often looking at the situation with blinders on. I still went in to see him on my own when I was in the facility just to say hi. He was a very nice man. Mr. P's life was like a history lesson on the 'Greatest Generation'. Born into a poor farm family in Pennsylvania, an alcoholic father who abandoned them, him working as the provider as a kid during the depression. From that background he managed to graduate from West Point, marry his high school sweet heart, serve as a Lt. in WW2 as head of the guard unit at the Nuremberg Trials, graduate top of his class from Yale Law School, become a partner in a 200 plus attorney, white shoe Ea

  Just how bad is alcohol? Eight experts weigh in on the risks and supposed benefits of drinking (msn.com) I remember a few years ago all the studies saying how good a couple of glasses of wine was for your health. It never quite made sense to me in a rational way, and I was always suspicious it was an advertising ploy to make all the soccer mom drunks feel good about slugging down alcohol. Now they are connecting alcohol to all kinds of cancer, even with light drinking. I am still thinking that any drug that makes you feel good is probably messing with your body negatively in other ways, robbing Peter to pay Paul so to speak. Now I am still convinced that a little social drinking is probably OK, especially if one lives a pretty healthy lifestyle otherwise. Feeling a subtle glow and getting a little giggly occasionally I am sure has a few psychological benefits. In my case it was academic. I was a binge drinker and druggy. I was after transcendence and seeing how close I could get to t

  Hulk Hogan rips shirt at RNC: 'Let Trumpamania run wild, brother' - YouTube We are getting close to 'Idiocracy' for sure now. From comedy to documentary in less than 20 years. President Camacho is in the house.....

  Hawk Tuah / Spit on that thang (youtube.com) I can think of no better barometer of the tenor of our times than the literal overnight sensation of Hailey Welch, aka the 'Hawk Tuah' girl. She is on her way to making more money in the next few weeks than the majority of people in this country will make in their entire lifetimes, and all based on her spouting one line about spitting on some dick. Andy Warhol's famous 1968 quote “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” has now come to fruition. The old days of actresses surfing casting couches for fame and fortune seems like a quaint and time-consuming Puritan work ethic approach from another time for the generations coming up raised on soundbites and instant AI gratification. Save your money and don't waste it on those Greyhound Bus tickets to Hollywood, gals. If one ever questions how we are in the position of having the likes of a Trump vs. Biden presidential election this year, look no furthe

 This week's movie from 2022 with my buddy Melissa was "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent" and I was impressed! It evidently was a bomb at the box office, which is par for the course and almost a requirement for any film I like. This one starred Nicholas Cage playing himself in a surreal tale that works on several levels. It is an action/comedy/buddy flick and a very subtle parody of Hollywood pretention and fame. I really liked that you were never quite sure of when 'the movie within a movie' switched over. Nicholas Cage has certainly carved out a unique niche for himself in showbiz and this movie is a perfect vehicle for him. This film was surrounded by the Marvel Universe comic book movies that year and may have been a little too smart for the room to be a hit. This was the beginning of the great pandemic dumb down of American pop culture, not that it was too sharp to begin with.

  I remember when I was a cab driver in LA taking this really drunk and high hot shot sit com writer from a party in Beverly Hills to his house way up by the Hollywood sign because they decided he was too fucked up to drive. He asked me if I wanted some 'blow', as was the custom in 70's Hollywood, and of course as was my custom back then, I accepted. His beautiful home, over looking the entire LA Basin, was decorated in thousands of dollars worth of Buddhist sculptures and paintings and even had an indoor Zen sand garden with full size rakes for his guests. We snorted coke and raked in the garden. I asked him if he was a Buddhist and he said yes and material things meant very little to him. Only in Hollywood......  

  Page seven of my eight page mini-comic from the 80's marrying baby pictures with actual news articles from the San Jose Mercury the day I was born. Of course the war they are talking about here is the Korean War, but it sounds like a description of any of the constant series of bush wars that we have been fighting since my birth. We lost the Vietnam War, but I have a closet full of Hawaiian shirts from Vietnam, so I guess we are cool with them now, I haven't kept up. And it looks like the Korean situation has come back full circle to haunt us yet again. That 'snow' behind me under the Christmas tree was actually spun fiberglass. My father worked at the Corning Glass facility in San Jose at one time and brought home boxes of this stuff to use for Christmas decorations. It was deadly. Little slivers would get everywhere and be a constant torture, kind of like a 'death by a thousand cuts'. But they kept using it every year and it would be annual holiday month of

 I usually stay clear of posting political posts, but this presidential election season just keeps on giving and giving and I wanted to get ahead of the avalanche of propaganda from both sides that we are all about to be subjected to. Today everyone is being nice, but you can practically hear the whir of the spin doctors' brains on both sides as they try and come up with angles that will help their side. I am quite sure Thomas Matthew Crooks will be the person of the week. He may even be bigger than 'Hawk Tuah Girl' by Monday! He is pretty much a blank page so far. A registered Republican who looked like a Berkeley Radical from the 70's, who donated $15 to a Democratic PAC, almost no social media presence, a loner nerd in high school no one can remember, etc. So many templates could be laid over him. Applied physics is a funny thing. Crooks went from Trump's worst day at the office to his most important propaganda tool within the space of an inch. This picture with

  This picture is how I feel tonight after another reality check about the passage of time. I was walking Shelby on our evening constitutional when a cute puppy ran up to us wanting to play. I held the puppy until an even cuter Latina about 16 ran up to get him. She looked like she was made out of brown sugar and whipped butter and one of those girls so beautiful she actually pisses you off to be so old. She laughed and said her puppy slipped his leash. I handed her the puppy just as her equally beautiful friend came up, wearing shorts so tight that only Hispanic women can figure out how to get in them. They thanked me and as they walked away they were talking in Spanish. The one was speaking in a faster Mexican Spanish and the other one with the puppy was speaking in a slower Spanglish I could catch. She was explaining to her friend how her puppy had slipped the leash and that 'buen viejo' had helped her. That would translate in 'nice old man'. I hear a couple more 

  How mobile phones have changed our brains (bbc.com) Oh, I have no doubt smart phones are rewiring our brains bigtime. But different technologies have been rearranging our brains for countless eons now. Written language and the printing press would have been two huge ones too. I will accede that the process has speeded up lately. In the history of homo sapiens there were stretches of thousands of years where nothing much changed in hunter/gatherer societies. Even agriculture was a huge brain slapper that spawned specialization and defined the roles one played in a civilization. One of the first things that struck me when I was married to my first wife, an Apache woman, was how her family was very centered on oral traditions. Everything was a story as we sat around a fire pit in the backyard. The written word did not hold much sway in her family. Almost 20 years later during the '89 Loma Prieta Earthquake in the Bay Area I was reminded of the oral traditions again. We had no power

  Page 6 of my 80's mini comic marrying baby pictures with actual articles form the paper the day I was born. I am pretty sure my mother would have been diagnosed bi-polar these days. Back then they just called it moody. But in looking back I can remember the highs and lows, particularly the lows, and bouts of anxiety over trivial things. She had an artistic nature and I believe always felt if she had not had kids that could have been expressed more. I think she was right too. So this article about the 121st confirmed suicide off the golden Gate Bridge is fitting. And being it is an art teacher it made it even more perfect. By the way, that suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge count is 1400 and change these days. Been some jumping since I was born......

 For our 2023 movie this week me and my buddy Melissa saw "BlackBerry", a comedic take on the rise and fall of the BlackBerry phone. I bypassed such mega hits from that year such as "Oppenheimer" and "Killers of the Flower Moon". Both are damn long movies and seemed a little pretentious and preachy in the trailers. Never depend on Hollywood to be the arbitrator of morality gleaned from historical events. Hollywood has no morality. I have never been a blockbuster fan as it is, and 3-to-4-hour movies is way too long for my withering attention span.  I don't need to see a director masturbating to his genius. If they can't bring a story home in about 90 minutes I'm not interested. The first thing that struck me in researching the film for this review was how accurate it was historically. It did pretty much follow the true story of what happened to the BlackBerry empire. Even the actors looked very much like their real-life counterparts. The first t

  A couple of years back I was on the 'High Road to Taos' stuck behind an old pick-up truck loaded down with junk. I did notice there was very little thought or effort put into how his load was secured. I have a suspicion he took the 'High' in 'Road to Taos' very seriously. I was a little nervous and waiting for a chance to get around him, but was too late. On a sharp turn a bunch of stuff fell off his truck, and I was almost taken out by a propane tank that bounced over my car and miscellaneous other deadly projectiles coming towards me. I came very close to a bad ending. I stopped and picked up the junk strewn all over the highway before I went on, as it was on a blind curb and someone would have hit it for sure. I did keep one pretty good sized piece of wallboard that had fallen off the truck. I am always picking up pieces of wood for painting the Virgens. I used that piece of wood to paint this one. That piece had extra meaning somehow....

 I would even go further than just enjoyment. Blunders have catapulted me into many an adventure that a more linear life trajectory could never have. The secret is to do a post blunder examination, turn the blunder all around and study it from every angle, see if it had lessons to learn, and use it as a new base of operations until the next blunder. There is also great value in observing other people's blunders. I have learned many lessons in life and applied physics from offering to hold other people's beer. 

 

  A democratic republic is a form of government that depends on a rational citizenry capable of compromise and navigating gray areas. Those days may be gone for the USA. That is why I stay clear of partisan political posts on Facebook. No matter what the political position, I can see kernels of truth and intrinsic flaws in all of them, or at least the roots of their origin and what they are a reaction against. I gave up a long time ago trying to instigate any serious political dialogue on Facebook. It isn't going to happen, as it will require too many words in a row to contemplate for a population with an average attention span of 12 seconds. Hey, I am not complaining. I was born and came of age at the very pinnacle of USA power and dominance as an empire. Empires come and go, bloom, fruit, and rot regularly in human history. I believe technology just speeds up the process. Thousand-year empires may be a phenomenon of the past. A couple of hundred years might be all the mileage we

  Me and my buddy Melissa have been watching movies about every Sunday for going on almost 7 years now. The theme was to start in the present year and go back year by year to when the talkies first started, around 1930, then go back to the present year and do it all over again. It really has been a fascinating and educational study in how culture, mores, and society have evolved and changed through the decades. Now that we started all over this week with a 2024 flick, I have decided to do a weekly review of whatever movie we just saw. Self-standing movies are in themselves becoming an antiquity. Now all the energy is going into all those streaming mini-series. I don't own a TV, so I don't have a clue what that is all about. I could never sit through any movie or TV series alone. Time is too precious, especially at my age. As a weekly social event with an intelligent friend and having a theme is the perfect fit.  This week's movie was 2024's "Drive-Away Dolls"