Alec Baldwin apparently did NOT know the details of how his prop gun works. A gun expert demonstrates how they work. Truly horrifying!! 😢

Lady Gaga, a very talented singer and songwriter, has shown outstanding class by hosting a broadcast on CBS about the career & music of Tony Bennett, who has now turned 95 years old. On the show he sang several.songs with Gaga and they were both outstanding! 🎶 🎶

I watched the recent video of Zuckerberg announcing the name of his new frontier called meta. I didn’t find anything interesting about the future he is selling. Are those into gaming or VR excited about his vision? Are folks in those fields excited about what he is selling?

Today is the fourth anniversary of our big move to my home town after 50 years in California. It was my brilliant wife’s smart idea to do it. We have been in a safe place, three blocks west of my grade school in Lincoln Land, since well in advance of the world going crazy.
🌎

Here’s something for the Americans here. More than forty years ago. Long before today’s high technology existed, when words really mattered.

Although Christo passed away last May, his team was able to complete the wrapping of L’Arc de Triomphe even after he was gone. And they will also do one final project in Abu Dhabi. I loved his Umbrellas on the mountains above LA.

When I was a kid, we always watched this show on TV without fail every week. Here’s one that was pretty amazing at the time, and still is!

I read the best way to live longer is to take a walk every day. So I took a walk, the first in a couple of weeks, among the roar of cicadas in the trees. Definitely harder than in the past, but I survived it. I need to increase the distance by 4X for the life extension I want. 🚶

Once again, I am saddened to see the lives of many good people destroyed by events totally spun out of control, triggered by shameful hate in a world far away, so many pawns destroyed by the horror of incompetent leadership.

If you’re elected president you are given full authority over all those in our military in the event of war. No military training of any kind required! This seems like a major flaw in our system. Ike was certainly qualified to be Commander in Chief, but our current prez is not.💣

I grew up in a town 180 m south of Chicago & 3 yrs ago returned to my childhood home, after 50 yrs in CA. I’ve always mostly avoided Chicago and now even more so because of its gang violence. But in the last year or so I’ve wondered about What the Heck is Going on in Chicago?

Olympics Gold medal game in womens’ basketball, USA vs Japan. Avg height of the Asian team was 5 ft 9 in (5 ft 4 in play maker) & for USA it was 6 ft with their great center at 6 ft 9 in. No contest, right? Wrong! It was a terrific, fun game. Like Energizer Bunnies vs Goliaths.

Bring an old Mac back to life by installing Chrome OS onto it for free.

I’ve decided to be an advocate for hiking up Mt Whitney, the highest mountain (14,505 feet) in the lower 48 states. I did it the first time when I was 22 yrs old, and a second time in my mid 30’s. You should do it too, before you get old, like I and poor old Joe Biden have become. It’s an experience you will never forget. It is not easy, but even if you don’t reach the summit, it is a very worthwhile endeavor, something great you can look back on with pleasure, even in your 70’s. There are a lot of goals you could set that wouldn’t provide as wonderful a pay-off as this one. I very highly recommend doing it!

I love it when that happens.

As a result, I’ve decided to be an advocate for hiking up Mt Whitney, the highest mountain in the lower 48 states. I did it the first time when I was 22 yrs old, and a second time in my mid 30’s. You should do it too, before you get old, like I and poor old Joe Biden have become. It’s an experience you will never forget. It is not easy, but even if you don’t reach the summit, it is a very worthwhile endeavor, something great you can look back on with pleasure, even in your 70’s. There are a lot of goals you could set that wouldn’t provide as wonderful a pay-off as this one. I very highly recommend doing it!

Some people are not much into Bob Dylan or his music. Others are very deep into Dylan. Some are not sure and would like an easy way to sample what his music has to offer. This post is for that last category of people. It is a link to an outstanding website in the UK, which could serve as a launch site for hundreds of hours of exploration of Bob’s music. 🎶

It is mainly a compilation of Dylan covers, that is, performances of Bob’s songs by folks other than Bob. The nice thing about Bob covers is that one can get a huge variety of different singers and bands. Because of the legend & inspiration of Dylan, cover performers are often delivering the very best performance they can muster and it is likely it is with the most outstanding song they will ever perform, perhaps a song that inspires them more than any other material they ever work with and so they deliver a performance better than in much of their work.

One person has compiled over 9,000 Dylan covers, so it is very helpful to link to a page like this that points to some of the best of them. You can start just about anywhere and there’s a decent chance you’ll hit a winner.

If you’re at a complete loss, I’ll give you one suggestion. It is the performance of Pressing On that they have selected. This is not a very well known song by Bob, but it is my favorite from his Christian period, which covers three of his official albums. It is an incredibly inspired performance by a gospel choir with a lead vocalist named Regina McCrary. Your chance of just stumbling onto this performance by just poking around on YouTube is very unlikely. I think you’ll like it.

I found there is a nice bonus to this one. When I finished watching.it, YouTube cued up as the next song a performance of the same song by Dylan and his band in a legendary concert in April 1980 in Toronto. With this one you get to hear his piano playing, inspired singing and his excellent band and singers. So two for the price of one! 🎶

That’s just one suggestion, but the UK website has dozens of other performances that are also outstanding. One could spend weeks using this one web page to launch hours of enjoyable music.

Try it and enjoy! Ron. 🎹

Great News About Amtrak Trains

They have announced plans for brand new, more modern, trains. My wife and I really enjoyed our ride from CA to Chicago in a sleeper car with their current trains. This should be even better.
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“What’s really on my mind is new technologies all the time and what they’re doing. And what I say about the Computer Age is they’re just trying to knock everybody down to minimum wage, or they wouldn’t be investing all the money in these damn things, and of course everybody has to buy a computer now, the way they all had to buy a TV set and inviting you to dig your own grave, you know. And I’ve said too, it used to be that a man or person who got into some sort of trouble and lost a job, we used to say he had his head handed to him on a platter, well now people are getting their heads handed to them with tweezers, with microchips.”

Kurt Vonnegut on 5/26/97 at the very end of a CSPAN video.

MLB All-Star game last night. Today I found out that home field advantage for the World Series is no longer determined by the winner of that “game.” Now it will be determined by the team records; much more fair! So this yawner was totally pointless, not a real game at all!

Bob Dylan:
“Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff
Plenty of places to hide things here if you wanna hide ‘em bad enough.”
Lyrics from “Sugar Baby,” the closing song on Love and Theft.

I Can’t Leave Her Behind - 84,000 views on YouTube in three weeks
Originally recorded by D.A. Pennebaker for Eat the Document
at North British Station Hotel (now the Millennium Hotel) in Glasgow, Scotland on 18 May 1966,
Two days after the release of Blonde on Blonde.
The words to this song were probably improvised on the spot.

Do You Want a Successful Blog?

Advice about blogging recently began to appear on my Google newsfeed. Today a long article detailing 41 Incredible Benefits of Blogging appeared. Surely this is the definitive breakdown of the benefits of blogging! At the end of this very long article, it says Original Article Date: November 30, 2019/Updated June 1, 2021.

So this has been around for 18 months! It must be a very well known blogging business. So where is it from?

BRAMEWORK

I had not heard about them. They are here.

They will help you set up a WordPress website and blog in minutes. Their fees are listed here. 7 days free trial.

Clearly they have put a lot of work into the system they’re offering. I’m not looking for a way to make money with my blog. So I’m not the sort of blogger they want to help. But if you are, there’s a very extensive website there for you to explore.

If you find they are offering a useful system, let us know your experience with it.

Woz got the right start in electronics by becoming a ham at the age of 10 years old. Now he fully supports the Right to Repair movement & explains why in this video. I still have many 50 year old radios & there are many hams who can still repair them. 📻

More Nina Simone published on YouTube on 2 July 2021. Decades ago a client told me about this recording of Just Like a Woman but I never heard it until just now. Now you don’t have to wait at all. Click and enjoy! 🎶

Today you are you

that is truer than true

There is no one alive

who is youer than you

— Dr Seuss

Nina Simone Blues for Mama published on YouTube, 2 July 2021.