Category: CKB

Give the blog meme that keeps on giving

Passing it along from JBR… Take your name and put an album for each letter. Bonus points if you name the band/artist. Don’t repeat what’s been posted before.

C – Country Life – Roxy Music
H – Happy Nightmare Baby – Opal
R – Robot World – Bailter Space
I – In God We Trust, Inc. – Dead Kennedys
S – Street Hassle – Lou Reed
T – Take It From The Man! – The Brian Jonestown Massacre
O – Obscured By Clouds – Pink Floyd
P – Poet Fool Or Bum – Lee Hazlewood
H – Heyday – The Church
E – Eat To The Beat – Blondie
R – Recurring – Spacemen 3

Eight other cool things that happened on my birthday today

Special 40th birthday edition…

1. John Adams born (1735).

adams_j

2. Ruth Gordon born (1896).

harold_maude

3. Fred Friendly born (1915).

fred_friendly

4. Orson Welles broadcasts “The War Of The Worlds” (1938).

welles_warworlds

5. Grace Slick born (1939).

graceslick

6. The Soviet Union detonates the 58 megaton hydrogen superbomb Tsar Bomba over Novaya Zemlya – the largest nuclear bomb ever (1961).

tsar_bomba

7. The MC5 record “Kick Out The Jams” (1968).

mc5-kickoutthejams

8. The New York Daily News runs the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline (1975).

nydailynews_dropdead

Lightning!

File this under “one of those Charles Fort stories where the drought-stricken town prays for rain and gets a flood which destroys the town.”

A couple days ago I was thinking that it had been way too long since I’d been in a decent thunderstorm but it was just one of those idle thoughts. Until… I pulled into a gas station and just got out of the car when my entire field of vision goes WHITE with the sound of all the 12 gauge shotguns in the world going off.

After a couple moments of some serious WTF, I gathered my senses together to notice two things: the odd sizzling sound fluorescent lights make when they’re overloaded and burn out, and a couple of guys standing next to a CalTrans truck in front were laughing and pointing at a smoking telephone pole directly across the street.

“Careful what you wish for” and all that rot…

Goats

This morning I woke up to the sound of goats bleating outside and, yup, the goat herder on the hillside moved the goats directly below the house. It’s all in the name of fire-prevention – the hillside is overrun with dry brush and the idea is that the goats can get into places where human brush-clearers can’t. The effectiveness is still undetermined, though after the big 1993 fire anything that reduces overall brush is a Good Thing.

Of course since it is Laguna Beach someone always has to complain.

Goat below houseGoats below house

Which Creation Records band are you?

My Bloody Valentine
You Are… My Bloody Valentine.

You tend to be a bit distant and reclusive. You are a leader as opposed to being a follower. You are a perfectionist and pay very close attention to detail. You have the tendency to be lazy, which sometimes get’s in the way of you achieving whatever it is you may be trying to perfect. You don’t really care about what’s typically looked upon as the norm. You really don’t care about what people think about you at all, or at least so you try and make it seem. You care most about just being yourself.

what Creation Records band are you? (complete with text and images)
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Scale solar systems

papermache_jupiterThat ugly blob over there on the right is Jupiter. Well, Jupiter as I built it for school when I was eight in 1974. I found it recently in my mom’s house but couldn’t find the rest of the solar system, even another gas giant, to go with it. I distinctly remember getting the color scheme from the Pioneer 10 fly-by which I saw live on a broadcast at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Anyway, back at school I made a scale model solar system for class and while I couldn’t quite get the distance scale correct (Pluto would have been somewhere out in Kern County), I got the planet diameters down. Even got my photo in the local newspaper in their feature on my class. Some kids play with scale model trains, others build planets…

Couple years back I took a picture of part of the scale solar system in downtown Ithaca, New York.

What’s the point of all this? Some kids and scientists in the UK are building a scale solar system of their own (BBC news story). A little Googling turns up a meta-directory of scale solar systems.

 

My sorta DeLorean story

Lost in the fine print between the DeLorean car, the GTO, the cocaine, and movie time machines in yesterday’s obituaries for John DeLorean was that he was also responsible for the 1969 redesign of the Pontiac Grand Prix. I only mention this because my first car was a 1973 Grand Prix – couple generations removed from the cleaner ’69/’70 design, but still rather nice looking for the Detroit Iron of the day.

pontiac-mexico