More Gumby

Our Gumby and Blockhead figures have been very popular with Henry and Clara. When we were scrambling to pack the car for our sudden trip to Philadelphia last week for the birth of our granddaughter Violet I threw Gumby and Blockhead into a bag for the day long ride. The kids were extremely happy when we brought them out to play with while their parents were spending three days in the hospital.

I previously wrote about Gumby and his popularity with the kids and his special place in so many of my beer pics. The kids were very excited to again be able to play with Gumby. Becky ordered a set of Gumby figures from Amazon that included Gumby, Pokey, Goo, Menga and Prickle. I'm thinking we may leave Blockhead here with them and just bring our Gumby home. It was interesting that she could not find a site that sold new figures of the Blockheads.

I recently found a Gumby website at gumbyworld.com that provided an extensive history of Gumby by creator Art Clokey that includes information about each character from the Gumby shows, lists and overviews of all the episodes from each decade, extensive information about Art Clokey, his studio and his family, the Gumby fan club and an ongoing blog. There was some information on their other project for a Christian organization that I remember as a kid. It was Davey and Goliath. Very hokey. There is also a lot of information for collectors of Gumby memorabilia. A very fascinating site.

I've been showing Henry and Clara some Gumby shows online. Clara in particular is very fascinated with Gumby. The first season from 1956 is now on Netflix and we've seen most of the episodes now. On YouTube other episodes from other years are randomly available.

I certainly remember watching Gumby shows when I was very little. I was probably around six or so when I started watching Gumby regularly. They originally ran in 1956 and 1957. In 1962 another group of episodes were on TV and went all through the decade with additional characters being added over the years. The Gumby show made a comeback in the mid 1980's and a movie was made in 1991. I played a lot of the later Gumby shows for my kids and along the way we got them the figures that I've been using in my photos.

David Bowie 75

Today would be David Bowie's 75th birthday. I still really do miss him and the anticipation of a new David Bowie album. He was very consistently throughout his fifty some years of recording always interesting and usually great records.

Over the years I've tried to collect all of his music including compilations, box sets and live albums. My total count is slightly over 50 titles.

I've enjoyed every period of Bowie's music including some of those first couple of abums in the late 60's. The only ones I didn't care too much for were the two Tin Machine albums but of course I have them. However, I don't have the two live Tin Machine albums.

And of course there were the movies. I loved him in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Also The Hunger and Labyrinth.

There have been a lot of books written about Bowie and his music and I've read a few. I could probably spend the rest of my life with a Bowie book at my side. I recently a new biography along with a couple other books one about his recommended reading and his science fiction influence on music in the 70's. I has also read another biography of him in the early 1980's.

So earlier today I head some Bowie songs on WXPN which just whetted my appetite for more. This afternoon I put on my Spotify playlist Starman: Bowie Cycle which is based on a series of CD mixes I made with all things Bowie over the years. Now it runs about ten hours.

Here is a link to my post about the Starman playlist and a couple of the books I read recently... Bowie's Bookshelf, Strange Stars, and David Bowie: A Life.

Glass of Beer - Namaste White

Namaste White, a Belgian style white ale by Dogfish Head Brewery, DE. It is described on the can as being brewed with orange flesh & peel, fresh cut lemongrass, a bit of coriander, peppercorns and a generous dose of good karma.

I've had this beer before. The first time was a six pack I brought home back in December 2015. This one here was from a six pack Becky got for me and I'm enjoying it after a long day with the kids. It was a snowy day in Philadelphia.

The red flowers in the photo were sent over here by my brother Dan to celebrate the birth of Katie's daughter Violet Orla last week. Actually this was one of two flower displays that Dan sent over to Katie's house.

Sidney Poitier RIP

It came across the news today that the actor Sidney Poitier died today at the age of 94. He was one of the finest actors of his generation. The tributes are all over the internet as he was the person that paved the way for all black actors in film and in 1964 was the first black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor

I've been watching Sidney Poitier all my life but never realized that he was Bahamian-American. I also never knew he was tone deaf and unable to sing so he wasn't the stereotypical black entertainer.

So many great movies of his that I saw growing up including The Blackboard Jungle, The Defiant Ones, The Long Ships, Porgy and Bess, A Raisin in the Sun, A Patch of Blue, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, They Call Me Mr. Tibbs, To Sir With Love and so many others. He was practically the only black actor I remember as a kid that was a star.

I've been reading a lot of books the past couple of years on black history and the experience of black people in America. This man certainly has an important place in that history.

I'm Just A Singer - Songs 1972 FV

I'm just a singer in a rock n' roll band is just how the song goes and is a good way to start off a mix of songs from albums in my collection releases in 1972. This hour and a half mix is part of my new effort to create the Final Version series of mixes. 

This mix starts off with lots of hits from the year but towards the end has a few more deep cuts which I like because back in the 70's we were playing vinyl records and we played the entire albums.

I'm Just A Singer - Songs 1972 FV

1. I'm Just A Singer (In A Rock And Roll Band) - The Moody Blues
2. Rocks Off - The Rolling Stones        
3. Suffragette City - David Bowie
4. All The Young Dudes - Mott the Hoople      
5. Go All The Way - The Raspberries   
6. Metal Guru - T. Rex     
7. The Ballad Of El Goodo - Big Star    
8. My Real Hero - String Driven Thing  
9. You Wear it Well - Rod Stewart        
10. Couldn't I Just Tell You - Todd Rundgren    
11. Surrender To The Rhythm - Brinsley Schwarz  
12. Rock and Roll (Part 2) - Gary Glitter 
13. School's Out - Alice Cooper        
14. I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby - Captain Beefheart       
15. Ready To Go - Family
16. While The City Sleeps - Chicago      
17. We're Gonna Have A Good Time - Rare Earth 
18. Tripe Face Boogie - Little Feat
19. Eat Starch Mom - Jefferson Airplane
20. Standing At The Station - Ten Years After  
21. Midnight - Jimi Hendrix
22. Queen Of Dreams - Strawbs  

Dirty Sidewalks

We've been traveling to the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia several times a year over the past several years since Katie and Todd bought a house there. We walk around their beautiful neighborhood a lot and one of the things I've noticed is the amount of trash on the sidewalks, on lawns and in the streets.

I was wondering why there was so much trash everywhere. We just don't see a mess like that on Buffalo streets even in the poorer neighborhoods. It didn't take long to realize the problem was the city trash collection. It is total mayhem on trash day in Philly. Everything goes out on the sidewalk in a big pile. Large trash cans are overflowing, bags are left open and scattered about, recycled cans are piled in open cardboard boxes and people need to drag all their stuff to the curb. Then the wind blows. Every trash day there is trash blowing around all over everywhere. When the city trash trucks come down a street they leave a trail of trash on the street which ends up on people's lawns and all over the sidewalks.

I've traveled about to other Philly neighborhoods and the same thing seems to happen on trash day. The city gets trashed every week. There are some people littering but that is nothing like the trash pickup problem.

Buffalo has city provided tote containers on wheels in two sizes for each home. There is also another similar tote for recycle materials. Not only does the totes keep the trash from getting all over the sidewalks they also are very useful as a rat deterrence. Oversized trash put out at anytime is also a problem.

The trash in Philly reminds me of what it was like living there so many years ago before there was the anti-litter movement. People just dropped their trash everywhere back then. Candy wrappers, fast food bags, cigarette packs, anything at all was just dropped on the ground as they were walking down the streets. People also used to constantly throw trash out the window while driving down a highway or city street. It was all so very common until a national anti-litter campaign.

Apparently after World War II American companies began a campaign to continue manufacturing at their profit making wartime capacity and the result was a huge increase in consumer spending and consumption. All of these new consumer goods were in packaging that needed to be thrown out after use. The result was lots of garbage and pollution. Approximately one third of all trash in the world comes from consumer packaging.

Eventually a Keep America Beautiful campaign which really took off in the early years of the environmental movement in the 1970's. We saw lots of TV commercials about trash on the highways and littering in our neighborhoods. It was a very gradual process but things slowly got better over the next few decades. Part of that process was the recycling movement and the redemption of bottles.

Becky and I used to go to New York City a lot in the 70's and 80's and it was a mess. There was trash everywhere including cans and bottles. Philadelphia was any better back then. Urban messes. Things got better in NYC when the state passed their bottle laws. It made a big difference.

When I was walking around Mt Airy recently I was surprised by the number of bottles and cans laying on the sidewalks. They are left there because there is no incentive to collect them for cash like in New York. The other problem of course in Philadelphia is the haphazard trash collection by the city mentioned above. I significant percentage of any weeks trash ends up on the ground. It's obvious when you look around after trash pickup.

Trash collection problems in Philly have gotten much worse because of the pandemic. We did not see much of an issue in Buffalo. Our trash has always been collected in a timely manner and without a lot of debris being left on the streets.

So Philadelphia needs to implement bottle and can deposit like NY to create an incentive to keep them off the streets and sidewalks. The city also needs to have a program for aggressive recycling that includes mobile bins with lids and the same type of bins for trash that would help with rat problems and keep wind blown trash off the streets. 

The other issue is dog dirt on the sidewalks but that's another story.

The Quiet Americans

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts by Scott Anderson, 2020.

I read this fascinating biographical historical account of the early years of the Cold War over a three month period from October to December 2021. It was a really interesting retelling of the CIA's incredibly inept and bungling covert battle against communism and the tragic consequences for America and the world even to this day. It was a spy history.

I liked that the format of the book was biographical and focused on the personal experiences of a group of men who were spies for the US during and after World War II. It was interesting to see the initial response of America to Soviet post war aggression which was lame and inadequate. America seemed to be more interested in going after their own citizens and creating blacklist and their attempts to spy on the Russians always seemed to gone wrong through stupidity and extreme ideological rigidity. Much of what is discussed in this book only happened because of recent declassification of documents from the Cold War era.

The book was basically about four spies and the long list of mishaps and bad experiences that shaped American foreign policy during the post war years. Two of them would eventually leave the CIA in despair, one would go on to be the epitome of the bad destructive spy and the other would kill himself. It is said that this is the story of how America snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. It can also be said that the Dulles brothers were largely responsible for the destruction of America's foreign policy reputation. The best part of the book is the evaluation of the lasting impacts of the decisions made by the CIA and past administrations that have had a negative effect on America's relations with it's allies and adversaries alike.

It was interesting that the biggest enemy of the CIA was not Stalin or Castro but J. Edgar Hoover and his petty, vindictive neurosis used Joseph McCarthy to wreck the careers of hundreds of CIA workers. The book showed the US to not be morally superior to their adversaries and the efforts to overthrow democratically elected governments repeatedly to install right wing dictatorships was sickening and made me ashamed to be an American.

I recently read a similar book, Zero Fail, on the bumbling efforts of the secret service too. I've read a lot of books about Vietnam over the years and this book provided some very interesting insights on that debacle too.

The Final Mixes - The Final Versions

What do I mean by The Final Mixes. These are the Final Versions of mixes I've been making for decades. Making mixes from music in my extensive collection has always been one of my favorite pastimes and my way to relax going back fifty years. I made some mixes back when I was in the Navy and we played our music on some of the earliest cassette tape decks. Some of the guys were using reel to reel tape decks. Most of our shipmates were putting albums on tapes while they were home and brought them to sea where turntables were not very useful. Back then a few times I just put a bunch of songs on a tape.

Later at the house on Seymour Street one of my friends had a tape deck and we put a few songs on a tape to play when we had a party. Most of the time we always played records on the turntable but when people were over for a party and dancing the turntable would constantly skip. No furniture worked. We actually built a shelf attached to the wall so the records wouldn't skip when people danced... which was a lot when we had parties. So we had a few mixtapes back in the late 70's. I had a group of mixtapes ready to play for our wedding in 1980 and from then on I became making mixes obsessed.

I've written about making mixes a few times on this blog.

I stopped collecting new music when I retired in 2016. I got a subscription to Spotify to keep up and listen to new releases. I also began at that time to seriously explore my music collection that I had amassed over the fast fifty years. My goal was to immerse myself in those thousands of albums I had obsessively collected.

So over the past six years and especially when the pandemic arrived and impacted on everything. I found different ways to explore my collection and to make more mixes. One new thing was to make mega mixes where I would string together many mixes that would go on for many many hours. Eight to twenty hours each. The idea was that I could put on a mix and just leave it play all day while I did other things around the house. It was like having my own personal non commercial no talking radio station with only the music I liked and wanted playing. I also put these mega mixes on flash drives that could be played in the car and used for our long all day drives to Philly with no need pick out a tape or CD to play. The original idea of the mega mix was something that I could put on as we left the driveway and didn't need to change or think about until we got to Katie's house. 

I then discovered that the mega mixes were fine in some situations but I really missed having the much shorter focused mixes that I had been putting together for so many decades. I also realized that at this stage of my life I wasn't going to be doing this for much longer. I decided it was time to make those final mixes.

So the Final Mixes are my final legacy of mixes. My last and final collection of mixes that will probably take me a few years to complete. Each mix will run a little over an hour and a half. Why that amount of time? It's a good time. Not too long, not too short. Brief but substantial also long enough to explore with the familiar and the not something I've heard so many times. It's room enough for the hits and for the deep cuts of any time period or theme.

Each of my various categories I've created over the years will have a new Final Mix version. I've started with my Songs by Year mixes. I'm also working on some Night Chill mixes. There will be lots more and I'm putting them on flash drives. I'm also putting them up as Spotify playlists and adding them to this blog with links to Spotify. I've posted some to a Facebook mix group. This is a process that I started this year.

Peril - MAGA Dystopia

Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, 2021

I finished this book last week lying in bed relaxing after another day taking care of Henry and Clara while Katie and Todd were still in the hospital after the birth of little Violet. 

Fortunately I finished most of this book before we suddenly were called to come to Philly for the early birth of our newest grandchild.

It was a quick read up until that late December road trip. I had read an earlier book of Bob Woodward's on Trump a few years ago... Fear: Trump in the White House from 2018. There are several others I should read but the last book of his I read before Fear was All The President's Men back in 1974.

Much like Fear, Peril was Bob Woodward at his best doing what he really knows how to do and that is exposing presidential malfeasance in office. It was an interesting look into the end of the Trump presidency, the first days of the Biden Administration, the 2020 election and the aftermath, the pandemic and the economic crises.

It was an interesting collaboration with Woodward's fellow Washington Post reporter Robert Costa. I also really need to read Woodward's other book on Trump written between Fear and Peril... Rage from 2020. 

Mom Vilit

This is a picture of a drawing that Henry made and gave to his father to give to his mother at the hospital on New Year's Day. Henry was thanking his mother for the bringing his baby sister Violet into the world. He has loved making drawings.

Katie hung this drawing in her hospital room and she got many wonderful comments about it from the hospital staff who passed through her room.

In school Henry has been learning to write phonically. He keeps a journal of his writings which is very interesting to see how this process plays out in his learning how to write. It is very different from the way we learned to read and write in the 1950's.

Here is another picture Henry drew... Ashley and Andrew.