Robert Duvall RIP

I was sad to hear that the actor Robert Duvall passed away today and then surprised to hear that he was 95 years old.

He was in so many of the films I loved over the years. He was also in a lot of TV shows early in my life when I didn't know him or who he was or who he would turn out to be later on but apparently I probably saw him a lot on so many shows in the early to mid 1960's.

Shows like The Outer Limits, Route 66, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Combat!, The Untouchables, The F.B.I. and many more. And then he was in that classic miniseries I loved from 1989... Lonesome Dove.

The films of his that really made an impression on me as a young person were these and so many more...

• To Kill A Mockingbird, 1962
• Bullitt, 1968
• True Grit, 1969
• M*A*S*H*, 1970
• THX 1138, 1971
• The Godfather, 1972
• Joe Kidd, 1972
• The Conversation, 1974
• The Godfather Part II, 1974
• The Killer Elite, 1975
• The Eagle Has Landed, 1976
• The Seven-Percent-Solution
• Network, 1976
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978
• Apocalypse Now, 1979
• True Confessions, 1981
• The Natural, 1984

And the list would keep on going.

NBA All Star Game 2026

I've always enjoyed watching the annual NBA All Star game between the East and the West conferences and having grown up with the Phila. Sixers I naturally rooted for the East. I went to a lot of games during the Wilt Chamberlain Sixer years 1965-1968 and especially loved going to games when they played the Boston Celtics with Bill Russell on the court with Wilt. 

However, this year was something uniquely different with the all star game. It was the NBA's 75th anniversary so they created a different format to celebrate. They shifted to a 3 team mini tournament featuring four 12 minute games. Two of the teams, "Stars" and "Stipes" were made up of US born players and the third team, "World", was made up of international players. The players all played for some significant prize money.

I watched several games and it was some fun and very different. The international players lost both their games to the two US teams but they were close. The final game of the Stars over the Stripes was a blowout.

Overall it was a fun evening of NBA basketball.

Pasta Fasul

Becky made a Pasta Fasul dinner tonight. So called Peasant Food. 

It was very good. Pasta, beans and pancetta. And some very good cheese springled on top. 

And then we had some of that wonderful Heidelberg French Peasant bread with it too. 

Becky made enough of this soup that we will have some significant leftovers for the next couple of days... another dinner and probably a lunch for me too.

Dinner @ Coles with Brian

This evening Becky and I went out to dinner with our old friend and neighbor Brian at Coles. His wife Anne had to back out because of a medical procedure done to their dog who she didn't want to leave home. So after our dinner at Coles we stopped at Brian's house down the street where Anne had made a desert for us... peanut butter cookies. We hung out there for another hour or so and had a nice time.

Our dinner at Coles was wonderful as usual. I had their delicious Sheppard's Pie. Becky had their Buffalo Wrap and Brian had their Chicken Bruschetta sandwich. Brian and I had their black and tan Guinness and Southern Tier Pumpking... the Drunken Pumpkin which as become my regular pint at Coles. It wasn't on the menu this time and it looked like it was going to be reverted back to a seasonal Fall brew but they made them for me and Brian. I also had a St. Fatty's Irish Red Ale by Fat Head Brewery. Very tasty.

It was a cold Thursday night. I was surprised how quiet Coles was tonight.

Pizza & Salad

Some frozen pizza and a homemade salad. The pizza was a Rao's Pizza and was actually quite good... for a store bought frozen pizza. I liked the crispy crust and their sauce.

Becky's salad was wonderful and very tasty. A nice easy dinner.

The second picture is the salad before mixed on the plate.

The Clockwork Man - A Science Fiction Novel

The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle, 1923. Finished this crazy thought provoking science fiction novel last night. It's considered to be the first cyborg novel written in 1923. It was a very strange story of some 8,000 years in the future when the male gender becomes indistinguishable from machine or what we now call AI allows people to pass through time and space. Then a malfunction sends this "clockwork man" stumbling back to 1923 England to pop up in the middle of a cricket game. 

This is the second book I've recently read in the series of very early 20th century proto-science fiction published by MIT Press in their self-described Radium Age of underappreciated forgotten classics from 1900-1935. 

New Tankless Hot Water Heater

Today we had a new tankless hot water heater installed. It took a little over 6 hours with two guys working. It was a lot of work and they had to rerun pipes in different patterns and also had to drill through the side of the house for the exhaust pipes. It as a very noisy job but they got it done.

He said it would take a day or so for everything to settle in. 

Bad Bunny Show & Puerto Rico

Watching the Super Bowl halftime show yesterday with Bad Bunny reminded me of how much I loved my time in Puerto Rico with the Navy. I made many trips to that island paradise in the early 70's. Here is a previous post I made about that experience. San Juan 1971.

It was shocking how racist trump and his ignorant disgusting maggats reacted to this show. How they complained about not being able to understand his singing and that the super bowl half time show should be performed by Americans. 

Like they don't know that the people of Puerto Rico are Americans. And how many half time shows over the years have been previously performed by non-Americans... like U2, Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Shakira, etc. 

YouTube Music

I also recently signed up for a trial period for YouTube Music that is included along with my YouTube Premium.

I spent several days loading playlist from my iTunes program to YouTube Music using the Tune My Music app. I had started using that app awhile ago when I was moving playlist to the Spotify app. I tried the trial period and liked it but I had used up the free uploads so now I had to purchase a subscription. It was only about $20 a year so I went ahead and got it. I'll use it this first year and then unsubscribe. So I started moving playlist from iTunes to YouTube. I also found out it was easy to also move other playlists from Spotify to YouTube Music. I now have quite a few playlist on YouTube Music.

I also moved the playlist I made for Artists in my Focus series. I still have a lot of them to move. Then in my YouTube Library I also added a lot of albums that will be easily available. I can access my YouTube Music app from my laptops, phone and tablet and play them on a speaker with Blue Tooth. Right now I'm playing a mix from YouTube Music on my kitchen speakers through the laptop.

I'm going to investigate how to play it with the car stereo next.

I decided to give up on Spotify and move to YouTube Music after reading a book on the AI driven curated playlist... Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify.

Hot Water Heater Problem

Today we had a problem with out hot water heater. I was sitting in the kitchen when I heard an unusual noise coming from the basement. I went down to check it out.

I immediately saw water on the floor. Lots of it. There was also a strange sound coming from the hot water heater. I looked around and saw there was water coming out of the bottom of the water heater in fast drips. I started cleaning up the water and directing the flow to the closer floor drain by the sinks. Most of the water had been going across the basement and then along the wall to the floor drain at the front of the house.

We have a service contract with Reimer Heating and Plumbing. It was a Sunday morning at 11 am and I called them to report the problem. They promised a technician would come by today and inspect the water heater. In the meantime I closed the valve for the water entering the heater. A few minutes the water stopped coming out of the bottom of the heater. The problem was that the water throughout the house stopped coming out of pipes. I waited a little bit and then turned the valve back on. Over the next few hours we did have water but not hot water.

In the meantime I went online to do a little researching of the problem. Mostly it had to do with our hot water heater aging out. It was just about ten years old. I saw that hot water heaters generally last between 8 and 12 years which makes ours about average for failure. The problem looked like it was leaking from corrosion at the base of the heater which is a very common problem for old water heaters. 

I started researching new heaters including the newer tankless water heaters both gas and electric. It looked like we were probably going to spending some serious money to get a new hot water heater.

The technician came by around 4:30 and looked at our heater problem. I highly recommended a new one which we were expecting. He was very knowledgeable and spent some significant time going over our basement plumbing and gas line layout. He mapped out where the new appliance would go and where the pipes would run. It was a big job because of the basement pipe situation and the labor would be a large percentage of the cost.

He used his tablet to map out the pipe installation and the set up of the gasless heater on the back wall. There would also need to be exhaust pipes going outside but the back porch made it necessary to run the pipes out the side along the walkway to the backyard. I would have rather had on the other side of the house but that was just too much work redoing all of the pipes in the basement including both water and gas.

He came up with a total cost $8,656.08. He sent me the estimate to my email.

He said the work could be done on Tuesday morning which meant we had one more day of water issues.