Category Archives: General

Steve Martin At The Hollywood Bowl

July 4, 2014 Rand Simberg 6 Comments

In our seats, waiting to hear him play banjo with a bluegrass band and Edie Brickell. Then, the fireworks.

[Saturday-morning update]

What a great show. I hadn’t realized how seriously Martin had gotten into his music in the last few years. He’s equally adept at both bluegrass fingerpicking and clawhammer, and he and Brickell did some beautifully spooky songs in the latter style. He also hasn’t lost his comedic touch. “It’s always been my dream to play the Hollywood Bowl on the 4th of July. Call me crazy, but I feel that, as I step on this stage, I’ve taken a big step in that direction.” (Paraphrase).

Only disappointment was that the show wasn’t long enough, and the fireworks (accompanied by a medley of Sousa tunes from the Air Force Band of the Golden West, ending with the classic Stars and Stripes Forever) less spectacular than I’ve gotten used to in recent years, but still well worth the money and effort to attend.

[Update a while later]

One other thing. Paul Simon made a guest appearance, and sat in for a song.

General, Space

Happy Birthday, USA

July 4, 2014 Rand Simberg 7 Comments

Apollo 11 Flag

For those wondering, that’s Apollo 11, taking off on July 16th, 1969.

General, Space, Technology and Society

Miles O’Brien

February 25, 2014 Rand Simberg 13 Comments

…has just had an unfortunate life-altering experience, but he’s got a great attitude. As I noted on Twitter, we’ve come a long way with prosthetics, and they’re only going to get better (I suspect a lot of the progress has been driven by the wars over the past decade).

General, General Science

That Shark Off Manhattan Beach

December 31, 2013 Rand Simberg 9 Comments

…was almost certainly a dolphin, so the mother wasn’t lying to her kids.

We saw a pod of them cavorting and spouting a couple hundred yards off shore in Hermosa on Christmas Day, a few hundred yards south of where that picture was taken. Probably common or bottlenose, but hard to tell from that blurry shape in the wave.

General

The Big Sur Fire

December 17, 2013 Rand Simberg

Pictures and reports at the Big Sur blog. Hope the Post Ranch Inn and Nepenthe are all right. It’s been very dry year there.

Administrative, General

Denali

August 31, 2013 Rand Simberg 4 Comments

I’ve got Internet, obviously, but we’re too busy to blog. We got a bonus yesterday, driving up to our B&B outside of the park. We decided to take a side trip to Talkeetna, and happened to stop in to a little gift shop of local Alaskan art, when the proprietor looks up from the phone, and asks us if we’d like to land on a glacier for a hundred bucks each. The plane’s about to leave from the field and they want to fill seats. So we head over there, and hop aboard a DeHavilland Beaver with skis, with a 23-year-old pilot with a philosophy degree, head up into the mountains, and drop down between the ridges onto the ice. Unfortunately, the ceiling was only fifteen thousand feet, so we couldn’t see the big mountain, but the others were pretty spectacular. Pics anon.

General, Technology and Society

A Great Deal At Amazon

February 6, 2013 Rand Simberg 1 Comment

Get this Bosch router table, today only at this price. I bought a table from Rockler a couple months ago to build some new doors for our kitchen cabinets, but I did get a Bosch combo router that’s been great (I’ve been using the plunge base to mortise the holes for the hidden-hinge cups), and if I’d seen a deal like this on a Bosch table, I’d have gotten it instead. I don’t know how I’ve lived without them.