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Forget the caffe latte, screw the raspberry iced tea
A Malibu and Coke for you, a G&T for me
Alcohol, Your songs resolve like
my life never will
When someone else is picking up the bill I love you more than I did the week before
I discovered alcohol
O Alcohol, would you please forgive me?
For while I cannot love myself
I’ll use something else

–”Alcohol,” Barenaked Ladies

If you take a molecule of the simplest hydrocarbon, methane, remove one of its four hydrogen atoms and replace it with a hydroxyl group (-OH), you get methanol, the simplest alcohol. The hydrogen at the end of the hydroxyl is more “labile” than the others, so it’s relatively easy for methanol to lose it. That leaves the oxygen with a very friendly bond dangling, and it likes to hook up with its nearby carbon buddy,
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…well yes you did get some kind of award for “Mostest Detailed Information on an Obscure Topic”. –JP Stormcrow

[D]on’t tempt me to go all photochemical on your ass. If you want detailed information on really obscure topics, I can bury you. –James Killus

Ozone is the key ingredient in photochemical smog. Air quality standards for smog are designed to limit ozone on the assumption that, if ozone is reduced, other photochemical smog constituents will also be reduced. While other air pollutants like carbon monoxide and fine particulates are, by and large, directly emitted, ozone is a “secondary air pollutant,” meaning that it is formed by chemical processes in the atmosphere.

There is, however, a natural background of ozone in the troposphere, the layer of air that contains 90% of the atmosphere, and the part of the atmosphere where we breathe, where weather happens, etc.
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One of the post-Firesign Theater “rock and roll comedy” groups was The Conception Corporation. They put out two albums, A Pause in the Disaster, and Conceptionland. Both were good for Progessive Radio play in the 60s, which is to say the early 70s. (As I understand it, there is a third, live album now available as well).

One of the cuts on Conceptionland was “Rock and Roll Classroom,” another “What if Freaks Ran Things?” idea (see also “Returned for Re-Grooving,” by Firesign Theater). In this case, what if high school were really hip, or at least trying to be?
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At Eastshore Aikikai, where I practice Aikido, we’re pushing the geriatric envelope pretty hard. I’m in my mid-fifties and I’m in no way the oldest person in the dojo; there are also several students who are only a few years younger than I am. Get off my lawn, you whippersnappers or I’ll throw you off.

My mother is in her 80s, though, and she still belongs to a bowling league. Granted, bowling is a lot lower impact than Aikido. It’s also the only one of two sports I know of where people regularly die during participation, the other being golf. Of course the reason for that is that both are sports that have participants of any age, including the very old.

Or the very young. Tiger Woods famously appeared on The Mike Douglas Show at the age of 2.
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On my experiences at the Big Summer Classic at Camp Zoe in the Ozarks of Missouri—part deux…

I left off mentioning the lack of access to substantive and reliable information sources (either through limited technological means or simply unknown to them), as expressed by the attendees of the Big Summer Classic (BSC). Heaven forbid that some of these folks (kids) would read blogs or review source materials on the internets. I could only imagine that for many of the parents of the attendees watchingamerica must be perceived as the most evil and communist (Stalin and Mao rolled into one) of sites, daring to present anti-US propaganda from furren gummints.

Among those willing to challenge and acquire the best sources, the keys to a larger world-filled library, I particularly remember a couple of students from Ole Miss in Oxford, MS, and a half dozen from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, all of whom stopped me over the course of the weekend to get more references.

I will not mention their names, but I will offer some anecdotal referents. The couple from Ole Miss approached me late (early in the morning) after the show on Sunday to discuss their needs. Approached may not be the correct word, more like cornered my old tour buddy (also our tour bus chauffeur) and myself in the back of a vending booth, and pulled out paper and pens and had us try to write down URLs and other site resources for them.

They had also agreed to visit one of our Otter Clan projects (a massive rebuilding program of homes on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi) and needed that contact information. They really wanted to do something powerful, creative, active, and good, and when they made their requests in the most beautiful Southern drawl eva, I could not even begin to say “later.”

The University of Kansas contingent was led by a young woman graduate student, who had grown up in the Midwest, but had been able to attend a prestigious East Coast university.
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By Seattle
{Continuing a travelogue began here, and which ended with this: So we left Ruby Beach and survived the ride home despite regular reminders of boredom in the van. Did the boys have a good time? Yes. Were they glad we went? Yes. Even though at times they had to be dragged from the van, they were glad they went.}

Encouraged by this review, we expanded the concept for the next weekend and went to the San Juan Islands, adding my sister, niece, and ex-brother in law. This was full blown camping and since I had to make a last minute doctor’s visit before leaving, not nearly as organized as the first weekend. First we went to Shaw Island, known as the island that is least visited in the four islands that get Washington State Ferry service.

Shaw Island County Park, where we camped.

We found once we got there that children do not pack well and parents should always double check their work. Trying to sleep short two sleeping bags and two mats was quite the challenge. We couldn’t figure out where the missing sleeping bag was. Then sometime in the middle of the night my sister shoots up, unzips the tent door (which is an extremely loud sound on Shaw Island…) stomps off and comes back with a sleeping bag saying, “I woke up because my feet were freezing and I suddenly realized I’d packed one of the sleeping bags in the cooler….” I laughed and I laughed and well, I laughed. Then I was warm, but sleeping half on a mat, half on a folded up blanket….sigh. As an interesting aside, sometime in that relatively sleepless night, I woke and heard a rumbling noise.
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I am an independent scholar with a wide variety of interests. I have many projects in process or merely in contemplation, more than I can possibly complete. Graffiti was not on my intellectual agenda when, in October of 2006, I was walking about my Jersey City neighborhood and noticed things and stuff that prompted me to take pictures. Not remarkable or beautiful things, just ordinary things on the streets. So I got out my Canon point-and-shoot and began walking the streets taking pictures.

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OK, there was this time in college, I was dating a girl named Rhoda, and she invited me home for a weekend, and so I thought … no way am I telling that one.

–Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle

There are some stories that I can’t just change the names and get away with it. Probably the most important part of that is that the individuals involved would still recognize themselves, and it would, despite all attempts at anonymity, still be an invasion of privacy. Some stories are just too intrinsically personal.

Moreover, there are some bits of personal history, that, no matter how much I might try to take all the blame for whatever bad things happen, it wouldn’t be enough, and other people would be shown in a bad light. I’m not always against that, mind you, but sometimes I am, especially when I had too great a hand in the unfortunate events.

And sometimes, making a story more generic removes all its flavor. At that point, there’s no reason to tell the thing in the first place. That’s one of the places where you opt for out-and-out fiction, keeping the flavor, but creating new characters for all the events, and distancing the events by wrapping them in the outlandish, putting them in the future, for example, or having them occur while there is a serial killer on the rampage. Even that is a risk, of course. Sometime people still recognize themselves in your fiction; sometimes they do so before the writer does. Tough. That’s the biz, baby.

The one I’m about to tell takes generification to some sort of limit, I think, but there are some philosophical points that I’ll get at, probably not the most important things in the real story, but the only nuggets that I can pull from this stream at this time.
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By Seattle

It has occurred to me several times in the last few years that I’m living in the wrong decade, if not the wrong century. I’ve got the wrong attitude when it comes to vacations. Around me are adults who, when they think of taking a vacation, they think of taking vacations AWAY from their children. To escape the grind is to escape the grind of parenthood. The concept of the shared family vacation as part of the education of the child by the parent by exposing them to new places, history, natural beauty and time spent outside the home seems a bit old fashioned. An example: a father called and left a phone message for his son from his vacation in a tropical location: “Hey, just came back from snorkling-you would have loved it. I love ya -….” Personally I find that kind of message disturbing. How is a child supposed to feel when a parent calls to let them know what a great time they’re having-without you?

So I took my sons on two vacations in the last two weekends. First we went to Kalaloch Beach in the Olympic National Park coastline. Here is the gazebo at the trail head down to the beach:

And more of the beach proper:

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The Baby Boomers. The Rock and Roll Generation. The biggest and most photographically documented generation to date, if only because we’ve been around since the day the technology became affordable to the masses (later generations will catch up).

And we’re going gray.

Like any youth, we thought we’d live and be young forever. Like no other youth before us, our heroes were frozen in time by the lens of the camera. In our mind’s (and the camera’s) eye, Mick Jagger will always be a skinny, tousle-headed kid with huge but normal shaped lips, no matter that he just turned a dissolute 64 and has a mouth that droops nearly down to his sunken chest. 60 year-old David Bowie (who’s held up much better) will always be that gender bending almost elfin fellow with the sly look and the oddly captivating voice we first saw on television 40 years ago.

What inspired me to reflect on this phenomenon?
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