Izmir 1929 (photos 6-10)

The other half of the 1929 Izmir pics. Awesome, simply awesome.

Perambulating Pinschers

Clovas and Garth, the wayward Miniature Pinschers, are missing. Again. The guy still doesn't know where to look, so yesterday he showed up where Liz works to see if she had found them. Again. Today, he called her to see if she had found them yet. We'll keep an eye out for them (at least Liz will), but dude, they aren't homing pigeons.

Gullible

I don't have a problem with two redneck yahoos in Georgia having too much time on their hand, and concocting a hoax about finding Bigfoot's corpse. Of course they want me to believe Sasquatch moved for some reason from the Pacific Northwest to Georgia, then died, and that the rednecks fortuitously found the body before it decomposed. No, what I have a problem with is MSNBC.com ballyhooing this story for several days in a row, finally concluding today that the yahoos were putting us on. Well, duh, MSNBC. BTW, do you realize that the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary? If you don't believe me, look it up.

Izmir 1929 (photos 1-5)

Izmir is a major city in Turkey, lying on the western coast on the Aegean Sea. Its ancient name is Smyrna. I have a friend there who sent me these pictures, which are said to be from around 1929. There's another five to go with these, which I'll post sometime soon.

. She also sent me a link to some pictures taken in Izmir in the 1890's. We'll eventually post those as well. I freely admit it - I love old photographs!

In case you were wondering...

These two images kinda sum up my thoughts on "English only".

Personally, I think every American should be required to become bilingual. When you learn a second language, you learn a second culture. Learn another culture, and you'll have a lot more tolerance for other people. Lord knows, dittoheads can use more tolerance.

Gold - Silver - Bronze

I finally bowed to Peer Pressure and watched the Olympics all last night. It wasn't as bad as I had feared - no gymnastics-ballet-dance-interpretation (or whatever they call that) and no Greco-Roman wrestling. I even found some compelling stories - one each involving a gold, silver, and bronze medal. The "Gold" story came in some incredibly long swim contest. There were the usual favroites - USA, Australia, etc. Up in lane 2 was a token "who cares about him?" entrant, a Tunisian named Oussama "Ous" Mellouli. Who we decided to cheer for, since one of my personalities is Carthagenian, and Carthage lies in present-day Tunisia. Lo and behold, Mellouli took the gold, which is Tunisia's only medal so far in the Beijing Olympics. Hamilcar had tears in his eyes, and was also pleased that there was no one representing Imperial Rome (Italy to you modernists) in the race. Congratluations Ous Mellouli! All of Carthage salutes you!! The "Silver" story is the American swimmer, Dara Torres. She's 41 years old, a mother, and someone who embodies the concept of Olympic sportsmanship. She encourages everyone around her, and holds up the start of a race so that a competitor can change a malfunctioning swimsuit (instead of forfeiting). And to those cynics who think that a 41-year-old can only compete via illegal performance-enhancing drugs, she offers to give extra blood and urine samples, in case better detection methods are developed somewhere down the road. The score : Confidence 1, Skepticism 0. Congratulations Dara Torres! You make all of America proud!!

The "Bronze" story is the American sprinter, Walter Dix. He's at the far-left in the picture below, showing the finals of the 100-meter dash. Yeah, the Jamaican, Usain Bolt, routed everyone else in this race, even coasting and mugging for the cameras the last 15 meters. That is quite an accomplishment, given that the race is over in less than 10 seconds.

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But it's Dix that caught my eye. In a sport where wind-resistance is a compulsive obsession, his dreadlocks were a welcome sight. And he wore his sunglasses, even though it was a nighttime event.

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Congratulations Walter Dix! All of us who "march to the beat of a different drum" have a new role model!!

Oh yeah, some guy won a bunch of Gold medals in swimming. Michael Phipps, I think. Or maybe his name was Michael Philbin. No wait, I think it was Michael Pheromone. Whatever.

Friday cartoons

Yessirreebob, we showed them Russkis who's boss.

Worth1000 fix for the week

Oh yeah, you might talk me into watching this one. Then again, probably not.

Georgia on my mind...

What were those chuckleheads in Georgia thinking when they "liberated" South Ossetia? Has Putin given the impression of being a wimp? Here's the best analogy I can come up with. Suppose Hawaii decides to break away from the USA. (and given the history of our heavy-handed occupation of Hawaii, they have every moral right to do so). Then let's say there is enough tension there to where the whites and natives tend to migrate into separate neighborhoods, a sort of de facto segregation. Now further imagine the Hawaiian national government opening discussion with the Chinese for a mutual defense pact. And last of all, they move against the white settlers in Hawaii, in a Zimbabwe-type "land liberation" grab. At some point, you just sorta expect the US to give those Hawaiian upstarts a forceful military response in order to show them who's who. So it goes with Georgia deciding to force the issue in South Ossetia. They've whopped the bear across the nose a couple times, and now one very p*ssed-off grizzly is on the rampage. I can sympathize with Georgia's present predicament, but for Pete's sake, what did you expect when you slapped Putin's face?

Batman - The Dark Knight

With Christian Bale and (the late) Heath Ledger. 2½ hours. Rating : ****½ (out of 5*). This Weekend We Saw... Actually, it's been a couple weekends. No need to give background on B:TDK, since everyone and his brother has also seen it. We went the second weekend (at 4:30 Saturday afternoon), and surprisingly, the theater was only half-full. What's To Like... Great action. Great acting. Great city shots of Chicago and Hong Kong. A very dark treatment of Batman, but hey, that was true in the previous film - Batman Begins. The 2½ hours went by very quickly. Oh, and the "wannabee Batmen" were a nice touch. Heath Ledger is superb as the Joker. There's nothing funny about him, as opposed to the way Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero played him. He steals the spotlight from Bale's Batman, but then again, that's been happening since the TV series. There are some nice twists, such as when the Joker kidnaps both the promising DA and Batman's ex-GF, and puts them in two widely-separated warehouses with (of course) bombs. Batman (seemingly) only has time to save one of them. Guess how this gets resolved. Wrong! Oh yeah, and there's no Robin. That's a plus. What's Not To Like... It was best not to try and make logic out of the plot. The Joker knocks over a mob-run bank, and offs its mob-manager. The ethnically-diverse (yeah right) mobsters meet, only to find some Chinese guy has inexplicably taken all their money to Hong Kong. For equally obscure reasons, Batman takes it upon himself to go there and recover the money and bad guy. The Chinese miscreant is eventually done in by The Joker. The mob forgives the Joker for robbing them, and agrees to give him half their money. Confused yet? Me too. Who wants to think anyway... Okay, see all those plot problems? Forget about them. Nobody goes to a Batman movie to critique its plausibility. B:TDK is great entertainment. I don't think I'm ready to claim it's the best movie of 2008, and I won't automtcially concede the Oscar & Academy Awards (what's the difference between those two anyway?) to Ledger, although his untimely demise certainly improved his already-good chances. Come the end of December, B:TDK will surely be in the Top Five movies of the year, so we'll give it four-and-a-half stars, only cuz I'm mighty stingy with my 5-star ratings.

Rounders

This is Rounders. Believe it or not, there are some people who think it compares favorably to major league baseball. Hey, that guy in the light blue shirt in the picture above is about to get whacked right in the.... yeah, well, pretty much anywhere he gets hit is gonna hurt.

Stay tuned. Sometime soon we'll discuss Britain's other baseball-wannabee sport - Conkers.

Perfect Day

Texas Rangers 15 - Baltimore Orioles 7

Arizona Diamondbacks 6 - Atlanta Braves 1

Philadelphia Phillies 6 - Pittsburgh Pirates 3

Los Angeles Angels 4 - New York Yankees 3

It was a perfect day of baseball for me. My Rangers, Diamondbacks, and Phillies all won; and those dastardly Yankees lost. That's Marlon Byrd in the photo, hitting a double in the Texas victory.

She's a doppelganger!

Or maybe they're twins, separated at birth. Alternatively, they're one and the same, since you never see Cruella and Cindy at the same time.

BTW, the author of this cool association is not me. It was originally posted at www.dependablerenegade.com a truly awesome website.

I've been here!

Only once, about 8 years ago. It was night when we visited those towers in the background, and drizzling. I'll let you guess this place. At the bottom of one of the towers is a three-story shopping mall that we wandered about in. At the time, IIRC, the public didn't have access to that walkway you see in the picture below. They opened it about a year later.

More Xkcd

This has been me once or twice. See more at www.xkcd.com

Perfect Time for a Breakdown

Artist : Sharon Little

Album : Perfect Time For A Breakdown (2008)

Genre : Blues (White Girl Blues)

Rating : ***** * (out of 10*)

. This Week I'm Listening To... Sharon Little was the opening act at the recent Robert Plant/Alison Krauss concert. As mentioned in the review for that, Sharon gave a solid performance, albeit nothing that would make Plant/Krauss fear being upstaged. Perfect Time For A Breakdown is her accompanying CD, and you can find all her concert tracks on it. This is her debut album, other than a demo, Drawing Circles, issued in 2006. . YouTube Links... You can hear/see Sharon singing Try, which IMO is her best song, here. And Follow That Sound, another good track from PTfaB, is here. There's another half-dozen or so SL clips out there at YouTube, so you can get quite familiar with her. . What's To Like... PTfaB exists to showcase Ms. Little's singing abilities, and it does a good job at that. All the songs are done in White Girl Blues style, but there's a nice variety of sounds within that sub-genre. . PTfaB can be summed up in two words : "Not Bad". The songwriter is not bad. Sharon's singing is not bad. Her stage-show is not bad. . Her publicist is doing a not-bad job. In addition to the YouTube videos, someone has recently (last couple weeks) added a short entry on her at Wikipedia. 12 of Sharon's family and close friends have posted rave reviews at Amazon.com. OTOH, the RateYourMusic entry is badly out-of-date, and has no entries. . What's Not To Like... Well, PTfaB can also be summed up in three words : Not Bad, But... The fundamental weakness noted at the concert carries over to the album - Sharon shares the spotlight with the rhythm guitarist, Scot ("one-T") Sax. The CD blurb says he co-wrote a lot of the songs with Sharon. And for all I know he might also be her main squeeze. But folks, the last time I saw a rhythm guitarist in the limelight was REO Speedwagon, and there at least he was also one of the lead singers. . Accordingly, the lead guitar is relegated to the shadows, both musically and personally. Sorry, Sharon, you're not bad, but to make it to the top, I honestly think you need to be complemented by a b*tchin' lead guitar. Hey, maybe you can persuade T Bone Burnett to join you. That would be quite the pairing. Perfect Time For A Wannabee... White Girl Blues is not one of my favorite music types, so I polled a multitude of other people who attended the Phoenix concert. I can't tell you their exact number, but both of them agreed with me - there are other artists who do this sort of stuff better. . Personally I felt Sharon was a Melissa Etheridge wannabee. Liz, who knows this genre far better than I, called her a Tracy Chapman wannabee. My co-worker friend suggested she was a Susan Tedeschi wannabee, who in turn has often been called a Bonnie Raitt wannabee. What does it say about you when you can be summed up as a wannabee wannabee? So we'll give PTfaB six "not bad" stars. And check back with her when her next album comes out. Here's hoping there will be a next album.

Bumper Sticker for the Day

Gotta get me one of these. BTW, my brother who lives in Los Angeles, for many years had a "Support Your Local Police...State" bumper sticker on his car. I wonder how many times he got pulled over because of that.

Where in the world?

This is on Bill Clinton Boulevard, which is in.... well, I'll let you try and guess that. A friend of mine just returned from there and took this picture for me.

Happy Ending

Our miniature pinscher saga had a happy resolution this morning. At 7:00 in the cotton-pickin' morning our phone rang. It was the owner of Mimi and Pepe; whose real names are Clovas (sic) and Garth.

He drove over right away to pick them up, and the resultant tail-wagging confirmed that he was indeed their owner. He lives a couple blocks from where Liz found them. When he came home Wednesday afternoon to find them gone, he said he didn't know where to look. So he didn't look. I think someone's a few fries short of a happy meal.

His mom saw Liz's "Found Dog" signs this morning when she was putting up "Yard Sale" signs. That explains the early intrusion on my weekend sleeping. But the guy has a 9-year-old son, who I am sure is overjoyed to have his puppies back.

All's well that ends well. Our three dogs said they won't miss Clovas and Garth one bit.

To Be Visited...

Here's one of the places I still want to go to someday. More specifically, Izmir, then down to the Anatolian coast. Gotta work on talking Liz into it.

She's done it again...

My dog-napping (or dog-rescuing, take your pick) wife brought home a pair of runaways today. They appear to be "mama & son", and are Miniature Pinschers. Which I am told are rather expensive dogs.

The pup has a tag, which even has a telephone number on it. Alas, the lady who answered tells us she's only had that number for about 3 months, and gets lots of calls for the previous number-owner.

So, the "Found Dog" signs are up, and here's hoping these two weren't dumped. If they were, hopefully we'll have an easier time unloading them then Liz's two previous "acquisitions", which were both Pit Bull pups.

We'll call these two Pepe and Mimi. BTW, I never gave the final outcome of Poochie, Liz's last bring-home. After 10 days of no one claiming him, I finally persuaded a friend of Jason's to take him. They hit it off immediately, but alas, said friend had to move into an apartment a week later, and it was a "No Pets" deal.

This had the making of another family crisis, as Liz wanted to bring Poochie back here, and I, along with our three resident mutts, said "No!!" But there was a happy ending to the story, as the friend found a relative to take Poochie. So Poochie, who is now named Mustache (don't ask. it's a long story), did finally get a happy home. For you sentimental dog-lovers, you can see a picture of Poochie/Mustache here.

Escher Tribute for the Week

Salvador Dali is my favorite artist. But Escher's in the top three. I love it when people do tributes like this.

Emmylou likes Chemistry !!

At least that's what I thought when I got Emmylou Harris' new CD (All I Intended To Be), and on Track 09, she calls herself a dimer. Now just why she'd refer to herself as a "chemical compound made of two smaller identical or similar monomers that are linked together by hydrogen or covalent bonds" is beyond me. Maybe she means she has a split personality. By that line of thinking, I'm a polymer.

Alas, it turns out Emmylou wasn't talking chemistry at all. The title to Track 09, "Old five and dimers like me", refers to her being a geezer. Or something like that.

Which reminds me - do you know how to tell if someone you know is a chemist? They think "unionized" is a four-syllable word. ;-)

The Smear Campaign

I work with a guy who is convinced Obama is a militant Muslim with direct ties to an anti-American mosque in London. He knows this, cuz someone sent him an e-mail saying it was so.

In other news, we saw Batman : The Dark Knight yesterday. It is very good, but I wouldn't put a label like "best ever" on it. A more-detailed review to follow.

Well, Hello Dolly!

Dolly makes our Arizona monsoons look rather dinky. And I'm looking forward to seeing storm pics on lots of Texas blogs.

For Bibliophiles only...

I have a grudge against the "Flo & Friends" comic strip, because it was a (presumably) cheaper replacement in the Mesa Trib for Doonesbury. The humor is bland, at least IMO. But if you think Dennis The Menace is funny, you'll like F&F.

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Be that as it may, today's strip was way kewl. Someday, I'm going to face this very same problem.

Just Wrong - July '08

I think we'll start a new semi-regular theme here. "Just Wrong". Some humorous. Some serious. All blatantly wrong. Babs gets to lead things off.

Dali Fix for the Week

A Worth1000 tribute to my favorite artist. Left-click on it for a better view.

The True False Identity

Artist : T Bone Burnett (Joseph Henry Burnett, b. 1948)
Album Title : The True False Identity (59:30 minutes)
Genre : Rock (50's & 60's)
Rating : ***** *½ (out of 10*)

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This Week I'm Listening To...

T Bone Burnett is a guitarist, songwriter, and producer, who was one of two awesome lead guitars at the recent Alison Krauss/Robert Plant concert. The True False Identity is his 2006 solo release, and was his first new studio album in 14 years.

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What's To Like...

There's a wide variety of musical styles and influences here - some blues, some ballads, and even a teensy bit of Jimi Hendrix-sounding stuff. But it is all tied together by an overlying 50's-60's Rock beat. Unsurprisingly, the guitar-work that takes center stage. Simply put, T Bone is a guitar god.

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YouTube Links...

You can hear track #2, Palestine, Texas (audio only) from tTFI here. A live version of track #10, Earlier Baghdad - The Bounce, can be seen/heard here. In fact, this latter live track is IMHO better than the studio version.

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What's Not To Like...

His guitar-playing may be fantastic, but T Bone's voice here is strictly so-so. But it's the lyrics themselves that are the weakest link. The rhyming schemes are for the most part, unambitious. One example :

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Joe wasn't slow

But didn't know

How to blow

All the dough

From the show...

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And while there are some catchy phrases scattered throughout the songs, they somehow are either too esoteric or too vague to give the song lyrics as a whole much coherency. Example #2 :

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When you're out for revenge

Dig two graves,

When you run from the truth

It comes in waves.

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Nice sounding, and the meter is good. But on further analysis, that verse doesn't make much sense.

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I'd Like My T-Bone Rare, Please...

Not only is he spectacular on guitar, but T Bone also has the Midas Touch when it comes to producing albums. His resumé includes Krauss/Plant's Raising Sand, and the soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou?

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It's a pity then that The True False Identity isn't a better effort. Perhaps T Bone should have someone else do the arranging of his songs, re-write the lyrics, and double the length of all the guitar soloes.

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In the end, T Bone's marvelous and complex guitar-playing (slightly-more-than) compensates for the shortcomings of the lyrics and song-arranging. We'll give this a "medium well" 6½ stars, and try to find his "20-20" album, which reportedly is an anthology of his 20 years of solo work.

One less planet to visit

Huqurrum-6, a star in neighboring Andromeda galaxy, went nova with almost no warning last week. Which unhappily toasted one of my favorite vacation planets, good old, balmy Huajixi. While I was there, working on my tan, no less. Luckily, I never leave home without a towel, a toothbrush, and a portable wormhole.

Night Lights

I'm pretty certain both of these pics are phony. In theory, they are NASA satellite images. This top one seems questionable to me. I don't think Greenland and the North Pole ice would show up that well in a night-time image. Also, the "tail" of Alaska seems to extend loonnnggg way towards Siberia.

This bottom one's even shakier. Lots of red lighting for no discernible reason. Ditto for the blue lights, especially those clusters between Scotland and Norway.

Still, these are way-cool pics.

Mission Accomplished

Isn't it curious - we invade and occupy the country with the 3rd- or 4th-largest oil reserves (depending on whose data you're using), yet gas prices are spiraling out of control. I guess it's true - "GOP" stands for the "Gas & Oil Party".

Trivia question for the day : from what country do we import the greatest amount of oil?

XKCD in Foxtrot

There, in the lower left-hand corner, is Foxtrot's most excellent parody of www.xkcd.com. And a fine bit of xkcd humor it is, too. I'm sure the other three offerings are also webcartoons, but I don't recognize them. As always, left-click on the image to get a larger view of it.

The Monsoons are here!

Actually, we haven't had a lot of dust (so far) with the 2008 monsoons, which is quite unusual. We've had rain three times this past week, which has helped our lawns immensely. Of course, it's also koncked a gazillion more pods out of the two frontyard trees. Still, I'd rather have 100°F and Houston humidity than 115°F and Death Valley dryness. Our dogs agree.