Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ferdinand II, King of Bohemia/Hungary/German Emperor, 1619-37 (1578)

J Schopenhauer, writer (1776)

Thomas Davenport, invented 1st commercial electric motor (1802)

Elias Howe, Spencer Massachusetts, invented sewing machine (1819)

Nikola Tesla, born in Croatia, electrical engineer/inventor, Tesla Coil (1856)

Daniel Guggenheim, U.S., Guggenheim Museum (1856)

Franz Boas, anthropologist/linguist, Mind of Primitive Man (1858)

H V Kaltenborn, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, newscaster, “There’s Good News Tonight” (1878) [I remember sitting on my maternal grandfather’s lap after dinners during WWII and listening to Kaltenborn on the radio]

Samuel Eliot Morison, historian, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1887) [Still the best biograph of Columbus and an account of his four voyages. I have it on my bookshelf and it’s one of the few books I’ll be taking with me to Panama]

Barbara Cartland, romance author (1901)

John Archibald Wheeler, born in Florida, American theoretical physicist, coined terms black hole, wormhole (1911)

Edward Heath, British Prime Minister, 1970-74 (1916)

Ed Ames, born in Malden, Massachusetts, actor, Mingo-Daniel Boone (1927)

Vince Edwards, born in Brooklyn, New York, actor, Ben Casey, Matt Lincoln (1928)

Lee Hazlewood, born in Oklahoma, singer, baritone, songwriter, record producer (1929)

J. P. Getty, US/British oil magnate/billionaire, Getty Oil (1932)

Donald Rumsfeld, politician (1932) [I just threw up in my mouth a little bit]

Richard Roundtree, Shaft (1937)

Brian Dennehy, actor, (1938)

Richard Staigg Philbrick, blogger (1942)

Dean Koontz, U.S., sci-fi author (1945)

O. J. Simpson (1947) [Do you think he’ll be getting a birthday cake?]

Jimmy Smits, actor (1955)

Tom Hanks (1956)

Argentina also declared it’s independence from Spain on this date in 1816

Posting may become a bit sporadic in the next three weeks. The Tour de France is on the t.v. and I have watched it every year since 1989 except when I was on my cruise through Mexico, Belize and Guatemala.

Not only do I like bike racing, but having lived in France for nearly three years I enjoy watching the race as it progresses through the countryside. The shots from the helicopters as the riders pass through old vinyards and medieval towns are spectacular.

This year’s race started with a time trial (a race against the clock with each rider starting at 90 second intervals) wound its way through the streets of Monaco and a little bit into the surrounding area. Had to. Monaco isn’t even as big as Central Park in New York and is second only to Vatican City as being the smallest country in the world.

The race ends in three weeks in Paris as the riders sprint down the Champs Elysee, which reminds me of two jokes:

Why is the Champs Elysee so wide and lines with trees?

So the Germans don’t get sunburned when they drive their tanks down it.

One day at the Bar du Port in Antibes my friend Bill was in an argument with a couple of the local drunks:

“You know the Arc de Triumph in Paris?” he asked.

“Bien sur,” (of course) they slurred in unison.

“Too bad YOU guys never get to use it,” Bill said.

I thought we were going to have to fight our way out of there that day, but even the Frogs thought it was funny.

Now off for some ribs and wings.

Very few people know that three cousins are all famous piano players: Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart. They grew up together in Farriday, Louisiana and learned piano there. Legend has it that Mrs. Gilley, who worked as a waitress bought the piano the three of them learned on.

I’m not a church-going person for a lot of reasons I won’t go into in a public forum like this, but I am a very spiritual person. When an ex girlfriend’s mother asked me if I was “born again” my answer to her was “my creator and I have never argued.”

One type of music I love is gospel. It’s the roots of rock and roll and rhythm and blues. So many of the greats of those genres came out of the gospel tradition…Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, Patti LaBelle and the greatest of all Aretha. In fact I have a recording of Aretha singing in her father’s church at the age of 15. She’s singing Precious Lord and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You could tell at that age she was something special.

When I lived in New Orleans I went to the Jazz Fest every year. My favorite venue was the Gospel Tent. I would go almost every day throughout the festival and always spent a lot of time in the Gospel Tent. It was the rockingest place in the entire Fair Grounds. The last year I went, ’85, I was there five times and the only time I left the tent was to go see Roy Orbison.

Here, then, are the three cousins doing their gospel best.

This is wonderful and worth a look.

The whole video is over an hour and a half long. Embedding has been disabled but you can get to it by going here:

It says the video isn’t abailable, but it is. I’m watching it off and on while writing this.

I have lived in southeast Florida, off and on, since I arrived in August of 1961 to attend the University of Miami. (Notice I said attend, not study. I had a real good time and learned absolutely nothing except that driving out to Crandon Park in a convertible with the top down in February beat slogging through the snow to go to classes in Missouri where I’d spent the previous winter.)

Through the years people have asked the question, “How can you stand the summers there? Isn’t it horribly hot?”

I would always answer, truthfully, that I had never seen it hit 1oo here. Close, but never made it to the century mark. I’ve seen it get to 100 on Cape Cod when I was a kid. Same thing in Chicago and New Orleans when I lived there. Every summer all over the United States it hit’s 100, but our southeast breezes off the Atlantic always keeps us just under the magic number. Sure, the “heat index,” summer’s answer to the “wind chill” factor…the “feels like” temperature will be over 100 degrees, but the mercury, what the temperature actually is, has always stayed below 100.

That is until yesterday. At 4:59 p.m. at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport, the official National Weather Service reporting station it hit 100 tying the record set on August 4, 1944!  The temperature actually reached 101 degrees in Fort Lauderdale but only for a few minutes, said meteorologist Brad Diehl of the National Weather Service in Miami.

“It didn’t retain that value long enough to count,” he said.

The heat index came in at 111 degrees.

It’s been raining all morning today and the temperature is clocking in at a comfortable 74.

I have been avoiding doing anything about the subject of legendery boat designer Phil Bolger since he took his own life May 24th. It seemed as if everyone who has a boat site on the web did their tribute to Phil. My main contributor, Ken Hulme, sent a post which I declined to put on here because I didn’t want to add to the overload.

Earlier today I stumbled across the site http://www.furledsails.com/. The site has 148 “podcasts” all relating in one way or another with boats, boating and the people involded in same. There are two very interesting interviews with Phil Bolger to be found here. If you have an iPod you can listen to Phil and his sylibant “esses” and maybe learn a thing or two.

The other podcasts, like with Lin and Larry Pardey, Ted Brewer and Chay Blyth and John Guzzewell who sailed his Trekka into yachting history are also there, too.

I’D LOVE TO LIVE HERE….

It is the Cinque Terre, a rugged portion of coast on the Italian Riviera.  It is in the Liguria region of  Italy, to the west of the city of La Spezia. “The Five Lands” comprises five villages: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore.

The coastline, the five villages, and the surrounding hillsides are all part of the Cinque Terre National Park and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Being retired I go to bed when I want to and get up whenever it happens. However, I set the alarm once a week so I can get up and watch the program Sunday Morning on the giant one-eye HDTV in my bedroom. While I enjoy almost all the stories they air, I really look forward to Bill Geist’s offerings. I think of Bill as sort of a gonzo Charles Kuralt. Since it’s summer they’re playing reruns on Sunday Morning and I got to watch Bill’s visit to the Heart Attack Grill in Tempe, Arizona. I loved it the first time and loved it this morning, too. If you are ambitious, go to youtube and search “Heart Attack Grill” and then  pick and choose from over 1,000 hits. Even Geraldo Rivera made a trip there, but I love Bill’s best. So, if you don’t have anything better to do for the next five minutes, check it out…

Even the Japanese know about the grill

And that bastion of gastronomy, the French pallet, where ketchup is labeled “sauce Americaine” had their shot at the grill…

But as with everything in life that’s fun there’s some person out there with a defective humor gene, like the Arizona Board of Nursing and Sandy Summers of the Center for Nursing  Advocacy.

I bet she’s the kind of person who tells their kids early on that there’s no Santa, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy.