The book in the photo is the collection of essays edited by David Rubinstein that came out this year. I checked out the e-book from the public library but it was the kind of book I like having around the house to read the various essays at my own pace without the need to get the book back to the library. So I bought a copy for myself for my birthday or Christmas or whatever.
It's hard to believe that the events of the documentary took place about 52 years ago and that first wave of Beatlemania happened back in 1963. I was in seventh grade when the Beatles came to America in a wave of craziness. The girls in our class were all excited and of course I also had an older sister who was a fanatic Beatles fan. Their music was playing in our house all the time.
It was in 1965 that I really started liking the Beatles and buying their records like Rubber Soul which is probably my favorite Beatles album. I would eventually have all of their albums and I would read several books about the group.
Over the years I've written about The Beatles a few times on these pages...
So I watched the first season of Hanna in 2019 and enjoyed it. Then the second season came out in 2020 and I watched it. I can't say I binged this series but I did watch it consistently until I'd seen all the available episodes. One of the things I liked about a series like this one was that it was limited in episodes. These first two seasons each had eight episodes. It just didn't keep going on and on. The first season ended much different than the film and the story went way beyond anything in the movie and went very deep into conspiracy theories regarding the training of children to become assassins. The cast and locations were very international. The second series ended with a cliff hanger and I knew there would be a upcoming third season.
The third season streamed in November of 2021 and was a very concise six episodes that wrapped up the story very nicely and ended the series. I watched the six shows in a little over a week.
In the end Hanna exposes the corrupt rogue CIA unit using kids as assassins with the help of a couple internal whistle blowers and she is able to start a new life under a new name. I have a feeling that there could be another season somewhere down the road although the series did have a very satisfying ending.
We had Dick and Iris over for dinner Wednesday night which was very nice having both sets of grandparents sitting together at the table enjoying some take out from Saigon Bangkok. Katie, Todd and the kids had a busy Thanksgiving day first with the Schifeling family for an early dinner and then later with the Koenig family.
We put the kids to bed on Friday night when Katie and Todd when out with family and friends. Henry and Clara were both very good going to bed and slept fine all night. On Saturday night we went to Dick and Iris's apartment downtown and we celebrated Clara's third birthday. I wrote about there here. On Sunday morning they left for their drive back to Philly and school the next day for Henry.
We had a wonderful long weekend and we are looking forward to seeing them again in January when we will be staying with them for about three weeks.
We were downtown for dinner last night and on our way back to our car we saw many people dressed for the disco party. The event wasn't held last year in 2020 because of covid restrictions on crowds but it was apparently back in full swing Saturday night but with a reduced capacity of 5,000 party goers dressed in 1970's attire.
The first World's Largest Disco party in Buffalo was in 1979 and a few months after Becky and I moved here. I remember it very well and was shocked and surprised that Buffalo would host such an event. That year was at the height of the anti-disco backlash around the middle of the country with disco record bonfires and such. A lot of it was very racists and homophobic. Disco was very urban and had been popular in cities for many years. I went to some discos in Europe during my Navy years and went to a few in Philadelphia in 1974 and 1975. They were just clubs with a dance music scene and then there was the punk, reggae and new wave scenes in the later 70's. In the meantime Hollywood made disco comfortable for middle America with Saturday Night Fever and suddenly disco music and clubs were OK across the country.
When we started living in Buffalo I was amazed at how hard rock the city was and Canada too. Then they started promoting this world's largest disco party in downtown Buffalo. The really funny thing was that there was a special train coming from New York City bringing partygoers because they certainly could not have some kind of world's largest disco from just Buffalo folks. Thus the party train.
Well, with the help of that train they did set the Guinness World Record for the largest disco in history with 13,000 people attending so I guess it was a success. However, that was the last disco party until 1994 when it started up again as the annual World's Largest Disco benefiting a local charity. It has been happening every year since then although last year it was a streaming event.
Tickets sell out for the event in minutes every year and have been limited to 7,000 because of the convention center capacity. I can't say I've ever been to one of those parties which are billed "the greatest people watching event on Earth". Really?
When we left their apartment we realized it was a crazy Saturday night after Thanksgiving in downtown Buffalo. The city was hopping. In building lobby we came across a group of young women obviously dressed for a night out heading for a limo bus. We thought they were going to a bachelorette party until we saw lots of guys on the street too and they were all dressed in disco themed costumes. Then we remembered the annual World's Largest Disco was happening at the convention center that night. We saw lots of people dressed in sequins and disco attire.
I was surprised there were so many people out at these large crowd events on a weekend when everyone is getting together for family gatherings and Christmas on the horizon. There would certainly seem to be safety issues with another virus variant on the way. Maybe people thought it was now or never or at least for another few months.
This was a quick read in November 2021 and my fourth book in the Detective Sean Duffy series that takes place in Belfast during the Irish Troubles.
This novel takes place in 1985 and is a murder mystery concerning gun runners, arms dealers, government agents in a place full of bombings, strikes, demonstrations, riots, etc. during the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Duffy once again is stuck in the middle of everything.
There are three more books in the series and I'm looking forward to reading more.
Giving it a 4.25 on Untappd.
This was part of a Troegs 12 pack of winter beers.
I've had Perpetual IPA many times and my first taste of it was back in 2012. I had my first Dream Weaver in 2014. I had a Blizzard of Hops at Goodbar in 2018.
I've never had the other beers in this box.
It included the following:
One of the things I remembered as I was standing there in the gallery gazing out the window looking on to the newly renovated and updated Niagara Street was sandflies. I was new to Buffalo then and had never seen the sandflies that were all over the place near the Niagara River back then. They were commonly called Canadian Sandflies by the people on the Buffalo West Side but if you went over the bridge to Fort Erie they called them American Sandflies. They covered the windows in my office back then and were everywhere around that building. They attracted spiders and there were webs everywhere too. This was all happening just within a couple of blocks of the river. Weird.
This little shit walks away after his mother drives him across state lines to a riot armed with an automatic rifle where he proceeds to shoot three people and killing two of them because he felt "threatened". Why was he there with an AK47 but to threaten other people.
This makes me so angry. I'll add to this post later.
However, the thing that has kept me going with the service has been their Star Trek shows which I've been watching. I'm currently in the middle of the second season of Star Trek Discovery and just finished season one of Picard.
I really enjoyed watching Picard and have always like Patrick Stewart. In this Star Trek series Picard is 94 years old and long retired but goes on another dangerous adventure. He played Jean Luc Picard for seven seasons on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I especially liked that other members of his former crew showed up throughout the show to give him help including Data, Will Riker, Deanna Troi, and especially Seven of Nine. Let's also not forget the Borg. Overall a very enjoyable show.
Picard dies in the end but of course since the series had a synthetic life theme he is given a new body. The new second season will premier in February and looking forward to that. In the meantime I will continue watching Star Trek Discovery at leas for the next month or so.
I finished this book today. It was published last month and I was able to download the e-book from the library last week. There are a lot of people waiting for the book so I read in quickly in a little over a week.
It was very well written novel about a very dysfunctional religious family from the Chicago suburbs in the early 1970's. The father is a minister with a Mennonite family background married to a woman with a history of mental problems and four children. The oldest is about a week younger than me and there were some interesting aspects to his life that I could relate to such as dealing with the draft, the military and the Vietnam War. But of course he was from a well to do suburban family where the young people routinely had student deferments from the draft whereas I came from an urban working class neighborhood where most of the kids my age and older were heading to the military.
Franzen was very good with some amazingly described characters but I was somewhat disappointed in the excessively goddie storyline throughout the novel. It seemed like most of the main characters wanted to stop everything and pray whenever whenever something went wrong. I guess there really are people like that but I just don't want to read about them.
The crossroads in the title was not just referring to the challenges of the characters' moral crises in their lives but also was the name of a Christian youth group social organization that triggers a lot of the action in the novel. The author does have a gift in blending all of those moral crises into a challenging social mix of family, marriage parenthood, religion, sibling individualism, drugs, adultery, coming-of-age, sex, music, church groups, etc.
While reading this book I was thinking a lot about my life around that time in the early 1970's and also the several years before. I had my own experience of turning away from organized religion and Christianity in general. My experience was so different than most of the kids in the book where they were embracing faith at a time when I found it to be useless and stayed that way for the next fifty years.
This is the first book in a trilogy and I'm sure I will also read the next two books.
I was sitting at the kitchen table working on my laptop and had to stop and take a photo of the sparrows waiting their turns in the feeder. They were only hanging out for a short time.
We do enjoy watching the birds at the feeder throughout the winter right there from our kitchen window. They are about half way through the first load of seed in the feeder. There have been some jays, cardinals and doves coming by but they can't get to the seed but so far no squirrels have been climbing over the feeder yet.
When the sparrows are around the bird feeder in numbers we always refer to them as the riffraff.
When riding the bike I am multitasking too. I always ride with music on. I have headphones and my iPod. I also have a tablet with me and will often be reading an e-book while listening to the music and riding away.
I get very restless at bedtime and sometimes it takes a long time to get to sleep. Often I do go to sleep right away but an hour or so later I wake up and then it's hard to get back to sleep without a lot of thrashing around. When that happens I wake Becky up and cause her to have sleep problems. I will often go into our guest room and sleep there where I can wiggle and move my legs around.
Riding the bike in the evening helps me sleep better and I get some extra exercise. Becky and I do walk a couple of miles most days but days when the weather is bad riding the bike is more important to me.
We've had this bike for decades. It was originally used by Jim, Becky's dad, when he was recovering from a heart attack in the early 1970's so the bike is close to 50 years old. I think we got the bike from Jim in the 80's but I'll need to ask Becky to be sure. Some of the features like the speedometer and the timer no longer work but I really don't need or use those things and just want to ride for a certain amount of time.
The bike is in our basement near our laundry stuff. I actually enjoy going down there to get some exercise and listen to music... loud.
I posted this picture of one of my dog tags today on Veteran's Day 2021. It's been a more than 51 years since I got mine back in February 1970. It was around 1990 that I took one of my tags and put it on my keychain. It goes everywhere with me. I touch it everyday. I remember.
The other evening I was standing at a bar with several other old guys having a beer and something came up about the military when one of them starting talking about a relative in the service. It turns out I was the only one that served and I had pulled out my keychain with my dog tag on it.
Also recently I had some dental work done to examine a chipped tooth and I had recently dropped my dental insurance that was separate from my regular health insurance because we determined it wasn't worth the extra cost but I had also found out our dental office offered a Veteran's Discount of 50%. I asked about it at the desk and when I pulled out my dog tag I got the discount immediately.
This is the first book in what the author calls the Noumena series. I read this during the first week of November 2021.
The novel is alternative history set in 2007 about a leak that concerns a first contact with aliens that has been occurring for decades but hidden from the public by the government. The book tells the story of a young woman who has made contact with the up until then very un-communitive aliens living on a military base. The cover-up begins to unravel as the hero of the story starts to change everything.
This book reminded me of growing up with the ongoing coverup story of Area 51. I've always been a big fan of science fiction and the first contact alien situation has been a stable of the genre for many decades.
I really didn't know anything about the author and was surprised when reading some reviews of this book, her first novel, that she had so many fans who watched her channel on YouTube where apparently she had a well received show that reviewed media using video essays. A lot of people seemed to have read her debut novel not because they liked science fiction but because they liked her online media presence.
Well, I enjoyed the book, the story and the writing style. I'm looking forward to reading the second installment in the series.
I put it on and let it play for the little more than four hours. The demos and expanded tracks were very revealing and I enjoyed it all very much. It was interesting to see what he would do with some of the songs in later productions.
It was also interesting to see how many great songs he had available for Beatles' albums that Lennon and McCartney refused to let him put on those records. He had originally submitted the title track to be on the Beatles' White Album and it got cut. For what? Revolution #9?
Social media has had a field day going after him because of his stupid anti-vaccination remarks about the NFL policies not being based on science. All of the Kaaron Rodgers memes are hilarious. He has bragged about following his own immunization protocols. He faces fines for violating the Covid rules of the NFL. Now because of his spewing of misinformation and junk science he has been dropped from several corporate sponsorships. He has been accused by other athletes as damaging professional sports.
He is just another example of anti-vaxxer idiots that are responsible for prolonging the pandemic.
However, he also had a stain on his career that will forever be noted in the first paragraph of any biographic statement. He went to the United Nations and stood before the American people and the world and lied through his teeth concerning the what we now know and he knew at the time was the bogus claims that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. He did not have the balls to publicly confront the lies and ulterior motives of couple of powerful yellow bellied chicken hawks named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
I watched some of the funeral ceremony today and listened to him eulogized by many different people who had many wonderful things to say about his life and his being a model and beacon for many minority Americans. Today wasn't the day to criticize his career over one significant shameful blunder that will have ruined his legacy. IMHO. I wish he would have spoken out against the warmongers who were out to get Saddam and the oil of Iraq and used the 9/11 disaster to push their lies. Colin Powell should have resigned rather than stand in front of the world and knowing lie to get America into a war that killed so many people and destroyed the reputation of his country.
Yesterday I also moved the comfy chairs from the front porch and into the backyard sunroom, the winter man cave. I put a few more plants in there and moved things around to be more comfortable. I also sat there for about twenty minutes with the stereo playing. I'm looking forward to spending some time there this winter especially on sunny afternoons. The room is a nice place to read, to write, to listen to music and to enjoy the nature in our backyard. I'd also like to spend a little more time listening to podcasts too.
I was reading something online today that reminded me of someone I knew long ago.
I have very fond memories of The Chief although I can't remember his name at the moment. It was over fifty years ago that I interacted with this particular Chief Petty Officer. He was an old black guy from New Orleans who had spent well over twenty years in the Navy and was close to retirement. I was his gofer for about three months from October through December 1970. I helped him around his office, ran errands and did typing for him.
I worked for him in a little administrative office on the Great Lakes Naval Training Center base. I had finished my training and was waiting for orders. I somehow got stuck in a limbo and the Navy had to give me a job while waiting for the paperwork which somehow took a very long time... several months.
I was assigned to the Ship Propulsion Training Program and The Machinist Mate A School at Great Lakes after completing basic training in San Diego. I had enlisted into the Navy's Nuclear Power Program which entailed two years of training before going to sea in a nuclear submarine. I had about six months of schooling at Great Lakes before I would be sent to the Nuclear Power School and the Submarine School in New London, Conn. I had a six year enlistment commitment.
My training was interrupted in July of 1970 when my father suddenly died from a ruptured aneurysm. The death of my father six months into my Navy enlistment was traumatic and had a very strong impact on me. I was home on a two emergency leave for my father's funeral and then I was back at Great Lakes to carry on as if nothing had happened. I didn't do very well in my training program and poorly at the school. The Navy had offered to give me a family hardship discharge but Mom wanted me to stay in and I did. However, I resigned from the Nuclear Power Program and it's intense training school. I finished the MM A school in September but was no longer in my original cohort. Everyone in my class got their orders except me. I had to wait.
Fortunately they had in my records that I knew how to type. I was given an administrative job working for the Chief in his office while waiting for orders. At the time they expected me to be on my way to the fleet within a couple of weeks. I would be there with the Chief for three months and probably would have been there even longer if I didn't make several written requests for orders. I wanted to go to sea and really didn't want to spend the winter at Great Lakes.
But I did like the Chief and he liked having me around. I learned a lot from him. He was a real jazz fan and played a lot of music for me in his office. He knew I played the tenor saxophone. He liked that I was a white boy from Philadelphia into soul music because most of the white guys he interacted with throughout most of his career have been rural Southern country music loving bubbas.
He also taught me a lot about food and in particular about hot food. He loved his chili and gumbo and constantly bragged about the food of his New Orleans. One of my little jobs for him was to go over to the mess hall and bring back a bowl of chili for him and myself. He had a drawer full of sauce jars to doctor the chili. He loved his hot sauces. This was where I learned to like hot food. He would sometimes have me get him soul food when the cooks at the mess hall had it on the menus. This was the first time I had chitlins' too which he also added his different sauces. We would sit there in his office eating the hot spicy food and listening to some great jazz.
He is probably long gone now and I wish I could remember his name. I can see him in my mind like it was yesterday. I can hear his voice. I can taste his hot sauce.
Last Thursday I took that broken storm window down to Buffalo Auto Glass on Main and Ferry and dropped it off. They said it would take a couple of days to get the replacement glass installed. They called me yesterday that it was ready and I went down and picked it up today. I was told they had some trouble getting the glass to fit into the frame because there was some damage that they fixed for me.
It took me several tries to get that glass storm window into place on the frame. It still didn't fit completely flush because of the previous damage and the replacement corner of the storm window. I needed to put some duct tape on the window edge to seal it and to get it to fit properly.
After all of that I spent another hour putting plants and tables into the sunroom and rearranging everything. I was also getting the inside shed ready to get everything ready for storing over the winter including the two garden hose reels and the many lawn chairs.
The only thing left to do for the sunroom man cave is to move the two porch chairs into the space and take out the two lawn chairs for the shed. I wrote about this winter refuge that I created last year and I'm looking forward to spending time there again this winter. With the new glass installed it should be even more comfy than it was last year and again I will be back there gazing at the snow while reading, writing or listening to the stereo.
I continued to expand the mixes and by the late 90's I was burning CD mixes that were an hour long. During this time and especially into the 2000's I was collecting lots of music and adding science fiction themed songs to the mixes. I eventually combined my science fiction and Halloween mixes into a CD series I called Monster Vision. There were five hour long CDs in that series and I posted them here in 2015.
I also posted about my science fiction mixes first as Sy Fy 1 and then the expanded Sy Fy Tu mix which was an all day 20 hour listening experience.
Now it is even longer as Space is the Place and went from 272 songs to 405 songs.
The mix...
1. Moonage Daydream - David Bowie
Byron Brown, whom I had voted for previously, had spent the last several months trying to get placed on the ballot for November and when that didn't succeed he began a write in campaign financed by trump supporting conservative developers who wanted their man in city hall.
I don't think any politician should be in office longer than two terms. He has had four terms and feels entitled to a fifth. I originally voted for India Walton as a protest vote against Brown in the primary to send him a message but I never really expected her to win that election. Now I'm very happy to vote for her again and fully expect her to win again although I understand that the establishment powers are arrayed against her.
Update: Brown has declared himself the winner by a significant margin. It sadly looks like I will be getting four more years of birthday cards from Byron.
On Thursday evening I was eating a snack and while munching on some peanuts I knew something was wrong. There were some of those salty sweet covered nuts in the mix that were a little harder than the rest and I felt something snap when I bit into one of them. I went up to the bathroom and checked my teeth and sure enough there was one with a jagged edge that wasn't there before. I had chipped a tooth.
It bothered me overnight because my mouth felt a little different. In the morning I called our dentist and made an appointment to get my tooth checked out. The appointment was for Monday morning.
Over the weekend I did not have any discomfort except for the feeling that something in my mouth was different. I was very careful not to eat anything hard because I wasn't sure of the condition of my tooth and I didn't want to make anything worse. That particular tooth did have an old filling in it and I was trying to make sure there was no further damage. I got through the weekend fine.
Monday morning I drove over to the dentist office for my 9:30 appointment. I was in and out in twenty minutes. I went in right away and a technician took an x-ray of my tooth before the doctor came in and examined it.
He recommended that I leave it alone. He thinks everything will be alright once I get used to the different feel in my mouth where the tooth chipped. However, if it was to continue causing problems then they would be able to cap or crown the tooth which would cost about $1,1000 according to the estimate that they provided me. It cost my $57 for the x-ray and exam. That was with a 50% Veterans Discount. The cap would cost $550 with that discount.
I had been going to Advantage Dentistry for almost forty years and just recently discovered they provided a special 50% discount for veterans. I'm not sure when that policy began but I probably would have saved some significant money over the years. Our regular heath insurance only gave us a 20% dental discount.
When I told the office person I was a veteran she asked for paperwork which I said I could email to their office but in the meantime I showed her my dogtag on my keychain. She laughed and I got the discount for the visit.
