The first car-spotting excursion, as a resident, in Berkeley on Friday December 11, 2009, provided the photographer with a chance to get some shots of this electric car.

(Berkeley CA) While visiting San Francisco, it became necessary to go to a bank branch that wasn’t the one this columnist usually uses and in the course of a conversation with the manager, he mentioned that if this customer intended to give the teller a tip, it would be better to donate to one of the charities that they suggested and then he dealt out a list of about a dozen good causes.  He caught us a bit unaware since we have never tipped a bank clerk.  Maybe the rich folks tip them like they tip the croupier when they win a big pot at Monte Carlo? 

The sheet of paper he provided was carefully tucked away so that the list could be accurately transcribed at this point in this column.  One of the disadvantages of a rolling stone existence is that things get lost and so, despite a sincere effort, no list.  The only one that comes to mind is the fog city SPCA.

A clothing store in San Franciso directed their customers to St. Jude’s Hospital (www.stjude.org) which assures donors that the organization in Memphis will never stop looking for cures for the diseases which severely affect children.

Activists on Venice Beach. Recently, were asserting that folks shouldn’t shoot sea lions (www.oceananimals.net)

While staying at the hostel in the Fort Mason National Park (spectacular scenery with a supermarket a just across Laguna St.) we encountered Padma Dorje who was collecting signatures as part of her effort to eliminate torture in the world.

Across the bay from San Francisco, the Asian Community Mental Health Services is conducting the Tiny Tickets effort.  Travelers are asked to send in their Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) tickets to help support that good cause.  (http://www.acmhs.org/bart.htm)

Fellow columnist (and occasional war correspondent) Jane Stillwater is conducting an online petition urging the reform of campaign financing.  For more about that click this link(http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/constitutional-amendment-to-stop-lobbyists)

While traveling in Australia (looks like the folks on Cottesloe beach will have to celibate Christmas without this columnist this year) activists for Greenpeace and Amnesty International seemed to be ubiquitous, but, upon reflection, they may not have been encountered in Kalgoorlie.  We assured those eager young workers that since we couldn’t afford to give money to their causes, we would urge the people who read our columns to support the altruistic efforts of both groups.   

Now that President Obama is in office and is directing his best efforts towards ending the war in Afghanistan, it will no longer be necessary for this columnist to constantly harangue his faithful readers with diatribes about the absurdity of the continued slaughter and carnage involved in the commendable American efforts to convert that county’s citizens over to advocates of democracy and free elections.  Also, this year as Christians celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, it will not be appropriate to suggest that former President Bush, who ignored the precepts of war established at the Nurmberg Trials or the rules of the Geneva Conventions, deserves a severe reprimand in the form of another War Crime Trial for himself and some of the members of his administration.  He didn’t know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (what better reason could there have been for invading Afghanistan?). 

Americans have given 43 a “Get out of Jail” card and so it will be necessary for columnists of both the conservative and progressive persuasion to find new and more compelling causes to espouse. 

We were pondering the monumental problem of deciding what crap to buy for friends for Christmas so that they could cram their closets with irrefutable evidence that they support capitalistic democracy via their effort to spend the country out of Great Depression 2.0 and not just by mouthing meaningless platitudes such as “Peace on Earth good will to men (who should be tortured to prevent new terrorist attacks),” when we realized that the Christmas scenes that depict polar bears (<I>Ursus martimus</I>) lurking in the background of the images of Santa may become anachronisms when the last polar bear drowns in an ice free Artic Ocean.

Bill O’Reilly made a pledge to America that he would protect them from pinheads in the media who disseminated faulty information.  O’Reilly is as much history as is “the Lone Ranger” program which must logically mean that the cry for Climate Justice is a legitimate concern.  He’s gone from radio and we’re still here writing columns.  Nice try, Bill!  Guess the people just didn’t buy your BS, eh?  Hence, if we write about global warning, it will now be up to Uncle Rushbo to protect the hillbillies from pro science points of view. 

Speciescide happens.  Folks who live in Berkeley know that UCB’s mascot is the California Golden Bear (<I>Ursus arctos callifornicu</I>) and many of them also know that the last one of that species was shot in Tulare county in 1922.  Therefore we will compose a column which will have the headline:  “Dead polar bear walking!” and fictionalize an interview with the plight of a unfairly convicted (that never happens in the USA, but movie fans know that some unjustified executions do occur in places such as Saddam’s Iraq) prisoner on death row.

What will happen in the future when there are summer heat waves and there are no polar bears in the local zoo to photograph?  How will the wirephoto division of AP cope with that challenge?

There are good causes and there are bad causes, but are there any uncaused causes?

Hmmm.  As an ordained minister this columnist has to wonder:  Does the Berkeley cheerleading squad need the services of a volunteer chaplain?

George Carlin has said:  “The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.”  How many little boys and girls in Iraq would like to ask Santa to bring back their arms or legs?

Now, the disk jockey, who heard this song on Revolution Radio (KREV 92.7 FM in the San Francisco area), will play the new curmudgeon anthem:  “I’m beginning to drink a lot at Christmas” (will that become this year’s viral Internet fad?) and this columnist will go Christmas shopping.  Have a “ho, ho, ho in Freo” type week.

We’ve run some tips for folks who want to find a hippie commune, but what about tips for people who want to runaway to sea?

If you are qualified to apply for jobs on yachts, then you might want to take a look at the website called Crew Seekers by following this link

http://www.crewseekers.net/?gclid=CMKE_5PKop4CFR4HagodRS_7mA

Arrgh, matey!  Good luck.

If you are thinking of running away to join a hippie commune, perhaps you would like the web site for doing school bus conversions?

So hit this link

http://www.skoolie.net/

As this year’s Remembrance Day was approaching, folks in the Los Angeles area were noticing that radio station KGIL has a new format and is calling itself retro1260 (dot com) because they are playing pop music from the Fifties and Sixties and that, in turn, reminds this columnist of some “never to be forgotten” lessons that seem to have become as obscure as some of the songs that haven’t been heard on the radio for forty years.  What would the soldiers who died in Vietnam have to say about the very likely scenario that President Obama is about to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan?  Can an entire country get Alzheimer’s disease?

Last year, this columnist was in Sydney on Remembrance Day and was very moved by the news coverage of that day’s events in their country. 

Anyone who graduated from college in May of 1965 will surely recall that the very next month LBJ sent six divisions of U. S. Marines to South Vietnam to clean the mess up. 

In May of  1965, Ford Motor Company’s Mustangs were all “fresh out of the box” new and the really shrewd guys were buying the ones souped up by Carroll Shelby’s team.  Some really smart fellows were renting “competition ready” Mustangs from Hertz and taking them out to a nearby track and using them to compete.  Why put that kind of wear and tear on a car that you own?

The bunnies at the Playboy Club served drinks with a maneuver known as the bunny slouch so that their cups wouldn’t runneth over.

If KGIL really wants to bring back memories, why don’t they use some recordings of the classic sixties disk jockeys introducing the songs?  Who can forget the voice of Wolfman Jack which was heard “coast to coast, border to border, wall to wall and tree-top tall”?  Didn’t Don Sherwood modestly call himself the world’s greatest disk jockey?  Isn’t Cousin  Brucie heard outside of Manhattan on satellite radio these days?

Leaving Scranton to take a job in New York City meant being exposed to unorthodox ideas.  Scranton’s own 109th Infantry Regiment from the 28th Infantry Division had been among the troops capture at Bastogne and they were the loudest warning the local kids that anyone advocating less than full commitment to the Vietnam war effort was probably a Communist.  Wasn’t the proof the fact that the only people against the War in Vietnam (in 1965) were college professors and show business people?  You didn’t have to be a big fan of the House Un-American Activities Committee to know what that meant.

In 1965, FM radio was a phenomenon that (mostly) hadn’t yet happened.  In Scranton, WEJL used the feed (with station identification blurbs) from WQXR which featured classical music.  Heck this columnist had listening habits that meant he was a fan of both Johnny Cash and Wagner (and that was long before the German got such a memorable plug in the movie “Apocalypse Now.”)

Back then the expression “Bookrow of America” referred to more than just the Strand Bookstore.  The one and only Barnes and Nobel bookstore was just a short walk away. 

Does the Wannamaker store still have that bridge that carried shoppers from one building to another over the street?

Back then, a policy called “the Hayes code” mandated that any criminal portrayed in any film had to be apprehended.  Thus young people were constantly reminded that the bad guys would always get caught.  The thought that an American could commit war crimes and then get a pass was a complete contradiction.  It would never happen, so don’t waste time worrying about that.  The WWII vets backed that philosophy with very strong assertions that Americans were the good guys and would never think of torturing a prisoner. 

Who had the “good guys” T-shirts?  Were they offered by WABC or WMCA?

Scranton may not have been a candidate city for housing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but it was the home for WARMland and WICK.  It was rumored that the Sunday morning programming in the Polish language earned enough money to underwrite the rest of WICK’s programs featuring the pioneers of Rock.

Will Fox News mention the irony of the fact that this year’s observance of Remembrance Day comes at a time when a new Afghanistan strategy is about to be revealed and that example of poor timing seems to make a mockery of the “never be forgotten” oratory that abounds each year when America marks “Veterans’ Day”?  Doesn’t the word “veteran” apply only to those who survived the carnage?

When KGIL plays “My Way,” we half expect them to dedicate it to George W. Bush.  “Through it all/when there were doubts/I ate them all . . . and did it my way!” 

Folks shouldn’t say “we will never forget,” if it’s obvious that they damn well have.

Youtube offers a clip of Cousin Brucie from 42 years ago promoting an effort to send a shipment of Christmas items to the troops serving in Vietnam.  That will suffice for this column’s ending quotation.  Here’s the link to that clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxb8PD_uQPE

When the Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam played Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” that was the signal that the final evacuation of Saigon was commencing, so now, just because he’s a sentimental old fool, our disk jockey will tear himself away from KGIL long enough to play that very song.  Maybe it’s time to contact America’s “granny war correspondent” and find out how to apply for an embed in Afghanistan and get out of Cali.  Have a week full of “foonman brothers” ads (or have you forgotten that “Laugh-In” shtick?). 

The Santa Monica Ice rink has opened and in Australia the citizens are getting all enthusiastic about Tuesday’s Melbourne Cup race.  It’s their version of America’s Kentucky Derby.  Many women go to work on the first Tuesday of November dress up as if they were going to the opera.  Bets are made during the day and by five minutes after three in the afternoon; it will all be over for this year.  Do Americans care about that bit of foreign culture?  Should we write about that or can we find a new take on the Bush wars?

In Los Angeles, the morning of November 1, 2009 was a living advertisement for the rich color saturation characteristic of Kodachrome film – or it would have been if you could still buy that type of film – because there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it seems like a perfect summer day was beginning.  There were various and sundry bits of evidence that another Halloween had been celebrated and they subtly suggested that perhaps it would be a good day to write a column about ghosts such as the specter of repeating Vietnam era mistakes.

A quick check of the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times showed that the only topics they found worth considering were a portrait of President Obama, a tough talk piece on Iran by Doyle McManus, the possibility of fraud in the Afghanistan’s runoff election, and two assessments of economic challenge faced by the state of California.

Speaking of Shepard Fairey’s version of the Obama portrait do you think that someday someone will write about about the AP image just as one has been written about Alberto “Korda” Diaz Gutierrrez’ famous shot of “Che” Guevarra titled “Che’s Afterlife:  The Legend of an Image”  (written by Michael Casey)?

A few weeks back, while we were staying at the Hostel California, in the Venice Section of L. A., and we noticed that one of they young folks bore a striking resemblance to Ernesto “Che” Gueverra.  We asked the others if they saw the resemblance to the Cuban rebel leader and the reply was:  “Who is Che Guevarra?”

Luckily a laptop was nearby and a quick Google Images search produced a picture and the young travelers were delighted to see that the resemblance was quite striking, especially when the young man was shot in a way that would duplicate the famous “Guerrilero Heroico” image.   Cameras were activated and the one young lady who got the best shot promised to send a copy to this columnist.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t arrived in time to be used as an illustration for this column.

Just a few days ago, we were recounting that incident and when they didn’t respond to the name of the place where it happened, we gave them a clue via a line from an Eagles song:  “you can check out anytime, but you can never leave. . . .”  Some of the young folks knew who the Eagles were (no, not Perth’s West Coast Eagles), and that song in particular, but some didn’t. 

Hah!  Isn’t it ironic?  The peacnik hippies, who were on the young side of the Vietnam era’s “Generation Gap,” are now explaining that era’s cultural references to today’s younger generation.  Could it be that thanks to Rush Limbaugh, today’s college students are pro-war and the older hippies are still advocating Peace, Love, and Brotherhood?

Yikes, do the students at Berkeley, who protested budget cuts last month, know the origin of the line “the kids still respect the college dean”?

How can kids, who think they are in the “counter culture”on Telegraph Ave., be “hip” if they don’t know the titles of the Fugs’ biggest hits? 

Were the lyrics: “I used to live in New York City
Every thing there was dark and dirty
Outside my window was a steeple
With a clock that always said 12:30” about the doomsday clock? 

What was the name of the Susan Sontag essay that spawned the “Trivia” craze in the Sixties?  If that one stumps you follow this link
http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/prose/Susan_Sontag_-_Notes_on_Camp.html

Back in the Sixties every college student knew the answer to this question:  “What was Fibber McGee’s address?”

It’s not that there haven’t been any good bands that formed since the Sixties ended; the band calling itself “U2.” seems promising and wouldn’t Guns’n’Roses be quite good if they could just “get it together”?

This columnist can recall a conversation held in a bar in New York City advocating skepticism about “Tricky Dick’s” plan to win the 1968 election with a secret plan to end/win the War in Vietnam.  The older fellow chuckled when he heard the label we had pinned on Richard Nixon and informed me that was what his kids also called the Republican candidate.

What was so funny about a line in a New York City newscast that said:  “The Jets won and Heidi married the goat herder.”?  Huh?

Is it true that the Smothers brothers got tossed off network TV for not being “fair and balanced”? 

What does the expression “Up Creek Alley without a paddle” mean?

Back in the Sixties the oldies stations played Big Band music.  Now, do the oldies stations feature Sixties music?

Yikes!  As mortgages go upside down has the Generation Gap returned with the hippies now playing on the old fogies team?

Is Joey Heatherton still the hottest go-go dancer you’ll ever see?

Why didn’t kids say that Keith Leger was playing the role made famous by Burgess Meredith?

Will Harry Harrison be able to reassure me that New York City is the greatest city in the world?

There is one intriguing question that remains to be answered about a revival of the draft and a massive surge in Afghanistan:  If Fox News supported Bush’s efforts to start the war in Afghanistan, why will they ridicule President Obama for trying to continue it?  Won’t that indicate a contradictory attitude about the war, the current occupant in the White House, and bring up questions about the sanity of their contradictory stances on the same war as conducted by different Presidents?

So, if President Obama, this week, announces a surge in troop levels for the War in Afghanistan, this columnist expects to endure a massive case of déjà vu and will need to hear repeated playings of certain record albums.

The young people who seem oblivious to the dangers of an eternal war that can’t be won might learn something if they talked to some hippies about war and peace and how America’s latest wars got started. 

[Note:  while this column was going through its final polish (at a coffee house in Venice CA) a bunch of younger people were furiously pounding out key stokes as a group mtual support exorcise for the National Novel Writing Month contest.  When their half hour burst is over we’ll ask them about the clock that always says 12:30.  The second youngest one knew it was from a Mama and Papas song.]

Che is quoted online as having said:  ““If you tremble indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”  Sounds like he was a hippie.

Now, the disk jockey will play the Snoop-Dog and Willie Neslson duet song, titled “Superman” as well as “Eve of Destruction,” and “Fixin’ to Die Rag,” maybe even throw in Joan Baez’s “Hello in there.”  It’s time for us to go splitsville.  Have a “Hey, Hey, LBJ” type week.

Our post about running away to join a hippie commune has brought in some hits and so we will post this link to one in Tennessee

http://www.thefarm.org/general/visit.html

Maybe we should go there and do a story/column about it?

Since this will be the weekend to contemplate scary nightmares, this column postulates the idea that Jeb Bush will win the 2012 Presidential Election and we’ll throw some “connect-the-dots” items out and let the readers have a chance to frighten themselves into a state of hysterical paralysis 

Most Liberals maintain that George W. Bush’s team (with Karl Rove as the captain calling the plays) stole the 2000 and 2004 elections but somehow didn’t engineer a win for Senator John McCain in 2008. 

The way conspiracy liberals tell it; in 2004 the electronic voting machines were used to steal the results in Ohio and that was enough to deliver the win.

If this is true, why didn’t they also put the fix in for John McCain?  How could they be so forgetful?

Perhaps, since the Republican political juggernaut was fomenting a massive amount of resentment for  wars, torture, and the handouts of bailout bonuses to the banking industry, they wanted to let the Democrats (almost) take over.  (You know like in the cartoons when the bird hands the dynamite stick with a burning fuse to the coyote?)  The conspiracy corner residents, who think that the electronic voting machines permit the Republicans to micro-manage results, might want to take note of the fact that the Democrats thanks to Joe Lieberman may not have a filibuster-proof majority after all.  Did Rove dream up an “almost, but not quite” style “majority”?

So, if the Republicans can sabotage the Obama program for four years, they can then run a campaign emphasizing that Bush’s successor did not accomplish anything and therefore he needs replacement.

If this premise is valid, won’t the electronic voting machines be used to further cripple the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, next year?

If, like President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama has to constantly battle a solid wall of recalcitrant Republican oppositionists, he would go into 2012 with an emaciated accomplishments list, which would set the stage for an “elect someone who will get something done” type Republican campaign against him.

The mainstream press has ignored the issue of the electronic voting machines’ reliability factor and so it seems likely they would greet a 2010 Republican “surge” with a shrug and a “the voters confounded the pollsters again” type of spin-cover story.

The possibility that the Republicans could use the kowtowing journalists in the (supposedly) liberal mainstream media to cast Jeb in a variation of a modern Restoration Drama role which would be as likely as your personal skepticism of journalism’s reliability factor would permit. 

With the help of a complacent press, Jeb could take the podium at the 2012 Republican Convention amid an enthusiastic partisan crowd and a “hear no evil, see no evil” press gallery would conveniently miss the zombie symbolism of the Bush family’s return to power.

Recently Smirking Chimp featured a story about the fact that Germany’s Supreme Court ruled that electronic voting machines were unreliable.

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/24469

A few days earlier the Bradblog web site (which has been covering the electronic voting machines’ poor performance record in test situations) reported that a Georgia Supreme Court ruling established that electronic voting results can not be contested on grounds that voters were thereby disenfranchised.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7445

At this point, it becomes a personal call for each member of this column’s audience:  If you can discount the 2004 objections, the failed tests stories, the ruling of Germany’s Supreme Court and the belief that the Republicans might stoop that low, then you can accept the possibility of a Bush Family return to power in 2012 as a legitimate news story.    If you concede all these points then you have to either find a plausible reason for the Republicans not to engineer such a scary scenario or you can start to prepare yourself for the gleeful Rush Limbaugh programs that would be used to (metaphorically) rub salt into the Democrats wounds following a Jeb victory in 2012.

This was just an attempt to provide a speculative Halloween column as entertaining as any of the installments of the Saw movie series.  If it turns out to be a prophesy . . . we tried to warn folks about the electronic voting machines, but they didn’t listen.  If we really wanted to scare you with this column, we’d elaborate on the particulars of just how long Bush’s “Forever War” is going to last 

Shakespeare wrote:  ‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.

Now, the disk jockey will play the traditional Halloween carol of Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash.” (Were you expecting him to play the entire “Music to Scare the Hell Out of Your Neighbors” album?) We have to go see if our contact at Playboy can get us into this year’s party at the Mansion.  We are afraid that it ain’t gonna happen.  Have a “Don’t ever scare me like that again” type week.

If Jack Kerouac were alive today, it seems quite likely that since he liked to be in the avant-garde contingent of contemporary writers, he would be blogging, but what sort of items would he deem worthy of his attention?  Would he point out the fact that after serving seven years as President, George W. Bush’s apologists were stoutly advocating the idea that some problems were the result of  Bill Clinton’s policies but a mere 8 months after President Barack Obama was sworn in, those same Republican folks were firmly maintaining that now all of America’s current problems are the results of the new President’s agenda? 

Perhaps Jack Kerouac would point out that the fact that Clinton had a long lasting effect and that the new President had quickly taken control might be a subtle indication that Bush’s interim period had been ineffective and impotent.  Do Republicans’ really want to imply that the USA’s first Negro President was a virile buck who has put his mark on world affairs that quickly and that Bush never managed to achieve that in seven years?  

After reading “Why Kerouac Matters,” by John Leland, this columnist realizes that a misperception had formed.  This reader had leaped to the assumption that Kerouac would sympathize with the political views of writers like Paul Krasner, Art Kunkin (of Los Angeles Free Press fame), or Hunter S. Thompson.  Such a surmise is very wrong.  Leland asserts that millions of Kerouac’s readers have misunderstood what Kerouac was saying.

Leland postulates that the father of the Beatnik movement actually held strong conservative convictions as far as political philosophy was concerned.  The literary critic then doles out the evidence to back up his contention.  (See page 28 in particular.)

Kerouac did not inject many (if any) references to the Korean War in his novels.

Who will win the Series?  Although Kerouac’s name was synonymous with New York City, he didn’t seem to care much about pro sports let alone root for the Dodgers, Giants, or Yankees.

For as much traveling as Kerouac did, he hardly ever extols tourist attractions.  He seemed to concentrate on jazz, drinking, and sex.  That and his spiritual visions endeared him to the hippies and they assumed that his mystical moments constituted permission to experiment with mind altering drugs. 

Would Kerouac have blogged about topics which were not to be found on the Internet, such as the hypothetical “Bloggers’ Hall of Fame,” or would he have extolled patriotic approval of all of George W. Bush’s war crimes?  What would you expect of someone whose hero was William F. Buckley?

If someone doesn’t start the Blogger’s Hall of Fame, what good is blogging?

How can a blogger compare the Golden Gate Bridge to the Sydney Harbor Bridge if he doesn’t make the effort to see and walk across both of them?  Why state a conclusion if there is no chance that the results won’t take the blogger a step closer to just getting nominated for a place in such a hypothetical institution?

Kerouac said “Why must I always travel from here to there as if it mattered where one is?” 

Isn’t the answer the same as the one to the question about why did that guy climb Mount Everest; “Because it’s there!”?

Kerouac did rewrites and polished his work and presented one draft of “On the Road” on one long continuous sheet of paper as if it were a product of a spontaneous burst of creative energy.  He gave encouragement to bloggers who tends to write fast and post in haste by saying:  “Why let your internalized high school English teacher edit what God gave you?”

Speaking of putting a roll of teletype paper into your typewriter and starting a marathon of keystroking, the folks at National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) are about to start their annual November typa-thon competiton.  Kerouac wannabes, you have been given ample notification.

Can you just imagine a talk show chat featuring Jack Kerouac and fellow conservative Ann Coulter?

Just before the posting process for this column was started, a quick bit of fact checking shows that the site for the annual blog awards (http://2009.bloggies.com/) contains a notation for repeat winners that they are considered to be at the Hall of Fame level of achievement. 

Who would get a link on a Kerouac Blog?  How about the teacher going around the world on a bicycle? 
(http://teacherontwowheels.com/) Talk about a road trip.

Why did this columnist and so many others leap to assumptions about Kerouac if the ideas weren’t in the words?  Leland leaves the questions about the possibility that those messages were present on the subconscious level and thereby more effectively communicated, to other future critics-analysts.

After reading Leland’s book, a re-read of “On the Road” seems quite likely.

“Why Kerouac Matters” doesn’t have an Index.  (Boooo!)  Somewhere in the book, didn’t Leland mention a jazz composition titled “Kerouac”?  Without an Index, that fact slips through the existentialist’s time warp and disappears into the either.  An Index would also help to determine which of George Shearing’s tracks Kerouac liked and which he didn’t because he thought they showed a new attitude of cool and commercial.

In “On the Raod,” Kerouac wrote:  “He said we were a band of Arabs coming to blow up New York.”

Now, the disk jockey will play Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray’s “The Hunt,” Prez Prado’s “Mambo Jambo,” and Slim Gaillard’s “C-Jam Blues.”  It’s time for us to bop out of here.  Have a “Go moan for man” type week.

This old Citroen was seen in Venice CA today (October 23, 2009) getting a frontal shot of it looked to be more bother than it would be worth, so we cranked off a telephoto shot and said “good enough.”