This is my surfboard from High School
I never was a good surfer, LOL… I tended to ‘purl’ the nose into the water, stopping the board and pitching me in front of it where the wave and the board would both pummel me. But I was pretty durable back then…. cuts and scrapes from rocks didn’t bother me too much, although I sometimes wondered of the wisdom in hanging my bloodied feet in the water from a board in the ocean for hours.
I really do think that surfing is one of the best sports there is…. it is usually an individual endeavour… just you and the sea….
Some of the beautiful and memorable events in my life happened from the top of my surfboard…. I’d spend a long time in the water…. all that rowing is good for the shoulders and back…. and the regular beach activities are healthy and clean. On ‘flat days’ we’d sometimes just paddle out to and beyond the kelp ‘fields’.. far out at sea, such that the cliffs along the shore were only visible at times when the swell raised you up a bit. Ah yes, the rash impetuousness of youth… but it was all good clean fun.
It’s always fun until someone gets hurt.
Many of my friends still surf.. even now that they are in their fifties and some in their sixties…. those who still surf have retained flexibility and stamina… it’s good seeing folks getting older nowadays and still staying kids in many ways… with the added smarts of being older.
This is my old surfboard from high school. It was made about 1967 by a shaper in Santa Barbara named John Bradbury. He eventually became a well known shaper, but unfortunately he passed away nearly twelve years ago. You can see this board had part of the tail break off before I got it, it was repaired with some fiberglass and resin. There are also a few small dings I (inexpertly) repaired with resin.
He built this and other similar boards for the waves at places along the Santa Barbara area… the Rincon… The Ranch… Jalama…. I still have the board… but don’t surf anymore.
One photo has the logo he put on this board.
His logos changed through the years as you can see at Stanley’s Surfboard Logos
(a huge site with a large number of surfboard logos)
A cool Truck
Vickie and I were in town and came upon a fellow driving this most interesting truck.
It’s a Chevy… an older model…
It’s got things that a truck doesn’t really need, like a supercharger….
it’s really fast, sounds so great with that ‘big-cam’ loping sound… deep cherry-bomb mufflers….
really cool.
Not what I’d put together… all these add-ons make for more maintenance…
But they are great for a fellow who likes to tinker with his vehicle….
The power they add cannot be disputed.
This is a daily driver for this fellow.
You could tell that it’s raw power this guy wants from his machine….
and he’s got all the equipment to make it.
One of the great old-time poet-philosophers, Johnny Cash, and one of his greatest songs… ‘Man In Black’
“I’d love to wear a rainbow everyday,
to tell the world that everything’s Okay.
But maybe I can carry-off a little darkness on my back,
till things are brighter, I’m the Man in Black”
“I hope I shall have firmness and virtue enough to maintain,
what I consider the most enviable of all titles,
that of an honest man” ~G Washington~
Reputation can be polished through a long time of honest dealings and proper actions. But like time, reputation cannot be run-backward and re-polished… once the taint of impropriety has etched the metal of reputation, even a lifetime of polishing will not bring the shine of virgin veracity.
Don’t trade off your hard-acquired trust for temporary gain…. the money garnered will last only so long… but the trust people misplaced in you will never be fully regained…. “once burned twice shy” goes the old saw….
I am not a watcher of daytime talk shows… but through the years I have followed the careers of a few people such as Oprah and Montel Williams. I know both of them have a huge amount of trust built over decades placed upon their personas by the US people. I have a great deal of respect for both of these performers who have accomplished so much and seem to provide a good service to the people by virtue of the (usually) good advice of their guests.
But sadly, I am seeing Montel Williams pitching a money-lending service on television and the Internet….. being reactively suspicious of such services, I did some looking into the company Montel pitches…. it seems usury to me. Looking the name of the company up along with the word ‘scam’ brought forth a large number of pages complaining of the practices of this company.
This is not a site that deals with scams or money management… there are many who can do splendid at helping people with these matters, people such as www.ripoffreport.com , www.clarkhoward.com or www.suzeorman.com all of whom seem to (generally) give rational advice… my purpose in this missive is to make a statement on trust and integrity… Montel has had the trust of the nation for many years…. his ‘personal brand’ is based on honesty and decent-dealing, but he has violated the trust garnered through decades by placing his huge following and personality behind this scam of a ‘money-lending’ issue.
There will be some who will counter that he is an actor…. he is a paid spokesman for a product, the same as Sally Fields with her Boniva ads…. now, while that statement can be made…. Boniva at least may have some beneficial results.. this usury by the company Montel pitches will only lead most followers to headaches, heartaches and more financial deprivation. The sad thing is the huge number of good-hearted people who will sign up for such a service based only on the personage of Montel. This proves his worth as a spokesman… but that worth is very much diminished for the next company that wishes to have him endorse a product. As for me, the next time I see him pitch anything… my thoughts will be less that it is a ‘quasi-public service’, as much as he is a pitchman who will hawk any product as long as the recompense is high.
Montel, I am sorry that you got roped into this deal…. I really hope you were stoned out of your mind when you signed the papers…. that is the only way I can keep a tiny bit of trust in your integrity… but then I must have worries about your thought-process while stoned.
Johnny Cash… ‘What Is Truth?’
“And in a time of change there comes distorted images,
and uncertain values.
And we all must search,
must search for ‘What is truth?”
Believe it or not!
There are lots of people out there that can make impressive web pages showing anything imaginable…
You can save the world if you just listen to them…. or maybe not… but what does it matter if you CARE.
Just caring is worth so much…. and it’s popular too!
When I was a kid there were still a lot of the old-folks who were born in the eighteen hundreds. Back then not too many people got into their seventies…. my parents donated some time with the old folks as volunteers with ‘Meals On Wheels’. So I met a number of the old folks. They usually liked to speak of the old days when our area was open range… they’d speak of taking wagons to the beach to pick up the boards and planks the ships would throw overboard. Our local tow didn’t have a wharf or harbor… just a long beach curving along ten miles of coast. So with no mooring for offloading, all cargo had to be rowed to shore (a VERY dangerous undertaking on our local beach) or simply chucked overboard if it would drift to the shore.
They’d speak also of the horse races they’d have up and down our main street every Fourth of July, or how the horses got spooked when the first cars came to town…. and how eventually the streets got paved making riding a horse more and more difficult.
I recall this one old fellow who always drove a rickety bike up and down some of our roads…. he was so unsteady on his bike that everyone worried he’d swerve into the path of their cars… I never spoke to him because he always seemed scary… and I was a kid… there was another house in a nearby wooded area that had an old man who had a chain attached to his ankle and the porch post. He had dementia and would go wandering off… the people of the house had work to do, woods to hunt and fields to plant… they couldn’t afford to have him wander off and get hurt. A friend of mine once told me the old man often peeled his clothes off and sat naked in the sun. One day he found the old man wandering down the road naked, his pants caught in the end of the chain dragging from his ankle twenty feet behind him.
So sad that the life and hopes and dreams and experiences of a person should disappear upon their demise… and even sadder when it should become locked in the vault of the mind… irretrievable except on those rare moments when some door opens and allows cognition before it slams shut again.
I am glad I took the time I did to listen to old folks…. but now that those people are gone… I know that I didn’t do nearly what I now wish I had. Old folks seem to like to sit and speak of the past… perhaps that is because they have more of a past than they can perceive of a future. Kids don’t think about past or future… they just are ‘now’. I guess like much in life, it is the middle that seems the logical place to go. A little of the past without dwelling on it… a little of the future, because if you don’t plan your route who knows where you’ll end up… and a whole huge amount of ‘Now’, because that’s where you are now, along with all your family and friends and the myriad creatures we exist alongside.
There’s something about old folks, kids and old animals…. young animals too… what would life be without puppies and kittens.
Whatever you want in your family can be transposed over to your local government and governmental agencies further up the chain. Any weak link can snap causing all to fall down… and the higher-up this weak link is, the more potential damage, and the heavier the weight of chain falling.
The head of a family has to be able to hold him/herself together in times of adversity… people are dependent on you to maintain stability in the face of adversity….
If the Lord of the Country flits about like a fool,
He will lose his leadership Tao Teh Ching
This idea extends all through all governance and business….
Many schools of thought insist on high morals…. most people see this as merely an effort to surround oneself with moral people…. but perhaps the ‘hider of secrets’ might not be the one you want hiding the secrets of your government or company.
There’s a reason governments and businesses often insist on people being open about their past when applying for work. If a person in power has deep dark secrets, they might be inclined to ‘tweak’ policy in order to keep this information being divulged through blackmail.
During the run-up to the war in Iraq there was a weapons inspector named Scott Ritter who gave huge amounts of alarm to the world… he said that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous person… that he had weapons that we’d not want loosed upon the world… he seemed to give the impression that Saddam needed to be stopped for the good of his people and for the safety of the world. Then he made an abrupt about-face. Quickly he became one of the staunchest opponents of the war. What happened to make these changes so quickly? Could there have been blackmail involved?
This is why morality among our elected and other governmental people is paramount. Even more than pure morality however is the fact that there be no hidden issues. All people have different levels of tolerance for moral issues. For some the bar is high, for others much lower…. so it can’t be morality alone that is the deciding factor… it is the hidden moral issues that matter the most.. these are the ones that can cause security issues.
One of the odd things with video is the big music companies trying to shut off display and sharing of their music videos, or the music they own rights to being used in personal videos and shared over the Internet through services such as YouTube.
I don’t know much about digital music…. but it seems to me that most folks aren’t going to know how to take the songs from the videos in a manner that will allow them to be kept on a player so they can listen whenever they want. So it’s not like they’re likely to lose a lot of business from potential customers. On the other hand, it could well be that many people will find out about an artists music through the Internet and listening a few times might be compelled to look the artist up and purchase the music online for their own collection.
I was happy to find one of my favorite current artists label has done such a thing with her music. Kerli’s tunes are now on VEVO through YouTube, and they give the code out so people can embed them legally into their web posts and share the music with others.
Now, I’m not ‘hip’. .. So I’m not often current on anything happening…. but I was asked to audition once for a music video for a young Estonian girl named Kerli. They wanted a ‘Creepy Guy’ for a song about a Creepy World. I didn’t get the role… maybe I wasn’t creepy enough… sometimes not getting what you want is good. But at any rate I became familiar with a young girl with loads of talent, a good heart and as Lancelot mused “She has a pretty face”.
We’re not in San Francisco, but these old lady cactus wear flowers in their hair.
I picked these little plants up at a plant sale in 1998.
In that twelve years they have gotten to nearly six feet tall. They have bits of the oak tree blossoms in their hair.
Well, I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa,
they sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall.
I bring them flowers about every day,
but I just got to cry when I think what they’d say;
If they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast,
and just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
So go on now and kiss it goodbye,
but hold on to your lover,
’cause your heart’s gonna die
Go on now and say ‘goodbye’ to our town, to our town.
Can’t ya see the sun’s settin fast on our town, on our town
goodbye.
This is a photo of the sun setting beyond our town, Nipomo Calif on New Years’ Eve We’re a very lucky little place, blessed with great weather, but sadly most of the town sits on a huge sand dune so most ag products will not grow well in the sand.
Yet we’re a little tiny agricultural town… but we don’t grow corn or rice here… our main ag products are nursery plants. Since the weather is so conducive to growth, and the highway 101 runs right through town, and there are natural gas pipelines nearby… there developed a greenhouse industry in our location. I don’t know how many acres are under glass and plastic here…. I know some operations that have hundreds of acres covered. so I’d imagine there may well be over a thousand acres under glass here. They grow seedlings for the farms in California and neighboring states. Seedlings are a very fragile little thing, and growers have much more success by having them grown in the tightly-controlled conditions of a greenhouse….. then enough tomato or celery seedlings for a forty acre field might fit into a tractor-trailer rig and get pulled to the Central Valley to be laid in that loamy soil.
The economy has hit this place like it has any others. But people still need to eat…. so while things are tough, and some homes have shuttered, things will go on. But still, this lonesome plaintive song by Iris Dement accompanied by Emmylou Harris is heart-and-soul of the nature of a small town…
Here’s two photos I took of the hillsides nearby the town. While most of the rest of the country is blasted by horrid temperatures, we’ve been basking in daytime temps in the sixties and low seventies. Most nights are staying in the forties.
Winter is the time that we have green hills…. by May the plants will be putting out seeds and drying up. All through the summer our hillsides tend to be parched and barren… tan tawny blankets piled high around one side of the town… the other side open to the moderating effects of the ocean… this keeps the town from getting too hot in the summer… and it helps keep it warmer in the winter.
This is the view I get every day! Our main cactus plantings are just up the hill behind me.
I think the cactus like the view, and they like the soils we’ve built up.
Happy cactus comes from California!
