Steven Parent is said to have been a random victim of the Manson Family on the night of August 9th, 1969. He had no connection to anyone there, and had merely driven to the property said to be the scene of the nightmarish murders to visit William Garretson, a caretaker who lived in a cottage behind the Roman Polansky/Sharon Tate house where the murders were staged.

I think it is pretty well established in our circles here that there were no murders that night, that Sharon Tate was not pregnant, that the Manson family was put in show trial, and that Sharon Tate disappeared, reappearing as her newly created younger sister Patty. None of them ever spent a night in jail. That being the case, it is unlikely that Steven Parent was killed that night. But he did disappear.

Continue reading “Some things I do not understand, Part 2” →

Note: This post was published by accident. I had many more topics to cover. I will continue with this in “Some things I do not understand, Part II.

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Face chops might be fatally flawed in that I am not in the room with the people I am studying. It could be, for instance, that Matt Damon has a head the size of a watermelon, while Tom Brady is more a cantaloupe.

Still, I get this:

It is not a perfect match in that the ears don’t align, but everything else does, and perfectly. The eyes and eyebrows, the noses, nose shape, mouth, lips, head shape and hairline. People are like snowflakes in that no two align, but these two do.

Continue reading “Some things I do not understand” →

Relentless heat propaganda

Below is a temperature chart put out by the BBC:

That red coloration is deliberate, a not-so-subtle way of suggesting that the planet is burning up. It is not. Two things I will bet BBC never mentions are …

Continue reading “Monday scuttlebutt” →

One of my pet peeves, as they say, or most annoying facets of human behavior, is what I call the “drive-by”, or instant expert. It is, frankly, infuriating to spend hours trying to understand photo trickery, as seen above, and then to be told by someone only glancing at the same photo that I am all wrong about it. Karen Carpenter is an amazing drummer/singer who supposedly died in 1983 after having run, with her brother, an amazing string of hits. In this photo I suggested she had her head placed on the body of a marathon runner or some such thing. I thought the red and white top looked like a jersey, and anyway, why the placard saying “1”?

Continue reading “Drive by, glance and shoot no more” →

Stepping Stupid

I have a lot of little things to write about, and a few big things that take research. Guess what I am doing today? Anyway, our Chamonix traffic tickets reminded me of this.

Back in the 1970s I worked for an oil company in the downtown area of Billings, Montana. I parked a few blocks away in a non-metered area. While that was going on, the Billings Police Department announced a program called “STEP”, or Selective Traffic Enforcement Program. The great minds behind it thought that if they selected an area, in this case downtown Billings, and ticketed every offense they saw, no matter how small or insignificant, that people would behave better.

I am not kidding. They thought this was a good idea.

Continue reading “I was once a counterfeiter, and the rise of the Reds” →

I just learned in the past few weeks that the city of Denver has a basketball team. They are called the Nuggets. Last year I learned that Denver also has a hockey team, called the Avalanche.

At the gym a fellow told me that eleven people were shot in the subsequent downtown celebration after the Nuggets’ win last night. Now they are saying nine. I’ll take their word on it despite the suspicious numbers.

Continue reading “Nuggets win, city is fired up!” →

Last Saturday my wife and I, imagining that even in our seventies we are not frail, went on a five-mile thousand-foot hike, climbing Mt. Lagalt. It is but a mile drive for us to get to the trailhead, a wide and gracious uphill climb that at a certain point becomes a narrow and steep climb. It is not dangerous, but the last part, the ascent, is a bit of a challenge. You’ve probably no idea if you are younger, but at our age, the concept of a mile becomes longer than ever before. Each of us were runners in our younger years, and a mile meant nothing. In my best days, not even approaching the really good runners I realize, I was doing 7.5 minute five mile runs, and shorter runs on occasion at 6.5-minute miles. Those were the barriers that I never broke.

Continue reading “A dog encounter” →

Yesterday my wife and I were working on our back deck, she making planters while I tried to clean out a problematic gutter that sits over the ell part of the deck. I had to borrow a 13 foot ladder from our neighbor Tom, but before that thought that an eight foot step ladder was enough to reach a gutter twelve feet high. In fact, the eight foot ladder was enough, but only if once on the highest step I made no movements, used no force and applied no pressure to the various pain-in-the-ass parts of the gutter that clog up every year. (I have an extension ladder, but cannot lean it into the gutter and accomplish anything without damaging it.)

One time on  descent from the eight-foot ladder, I said to her:

I would not like it if I fell.
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well,
I would not like it if I fell.

Continue reading “If I fell*” →

While we travel and hike, we have come across some amazing and free programs that we use regularly. The first is called Seek, put out by iNaturalist. It is available for free at the Apple App Store.

Seek has many uses, but we primarily use it to identify plants. We merely hold the iPhone camera over the plant, whether leaf or flower. It quickly identifies it, giving us the common name, though on occasion it offers only the Latin name.

It does not matter whether you live in a large city or rural area, or as we have discovered if you are in a foreign country. Its database is so massive that if knows every plant and every subspecies. It is truly a wonder to behold. When stumped, it offers “dicot” or “monocot”.

Continue reading “A couple of useful outdoor programs” →

In the past, as my wife and I traveled, I made it a point not to make the blog a travelogue. I just let it rest, hoping other writers would chime in. I know I wrote now and then while in foreign places, most prominently in my mind in Buenos Aires, where I tripped on the crypt of Evita, or Eva Peron, said to have died young in 1952. Her crypt said she died at age 32, but actual birth records recorded her death at age 33  and voila!, I had uncovered another fake death.

Continue reading “Our little journey” →