King of the Wild Frontier

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that when I was a small kid, I loved cowboy hats and my Davy Crockett faux-coonskin cap. In the old photos my sis has scanned was this one of me wearing that very cap. Needless to say, I was a big fan of Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.

In my 1950s childhood mind, I probably had quite a few adventures emulating the bravery of Davy as portrayed by Fess Parker in living black & white on our television screen. Of course I was not alone. Davy was a pop phenomenon in those days. After all, he "kilt him a bar when he was only three".

One of my toys from those days is still in my possession. It was a plastic squeak toy of a child dressed out as Davy. This may be the only toy I still have from my childhood, and frankly I am surprised it is still around. The second picture is it, and you can also see the chewed up end of Davy's rifle. I recall that it was a really pleasant feeling to chew that thing, not thinking about the damage it was doing to the toy. Maybe I was like a dog with a squeak toy, chewing and squeaking it as much as I could.

So there we have it. A story of a boy, a toy, and a frontier hero who died at the Alamo.

Heard of Jackson Hole? Here's Jackson Tree

It isn't uncommon to read stories about the Virgin Mary appearing in water stains under a freeway or on a grilled cheese sandwich. Or perhaps a cheese puff that someone thinks looks like Jesus. Now with the recent death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson has begun making appearances.

A family in Stockton, California says that Jacko has appeared on a stump where their birch tree had a branch removed. As Skeptic magazine publisher and author Michael Shermer has pointed out, we are pattern seeking animals. This is why we see shapes in clouds and constellations in our night sky. Despite that, I am sure there are people who worship MJ to the point that they will hang on to this as a sign of some sort. I just wonder...when they pruned the tree, did they remove Jackson's nose?

Yep...I'm bad.

It's Independence Day!

Happy 233rd birthday, USA!!

1939 Pontiac

I found out that my sister has scanned some old family photos that I never knew even existed, some of which I am very glad to discover. Here is one of them.

This photo was taken in 1955, and is my mother and I with our old 1939 Pontiac. I am sure of the year, as Mom is obviously pregnant with my oldest sister. This car is one of my very earliest memories. I vividly recall sitting in the back seat. I loved peering out of the second backseat window, the one in the very back that is smaller than the others. Another thing interesting about this car is that the back doors are hinged in the rear and open in the opposite direction from the front doors.

In this picture, I am wearing one of my two favorite types of head gear during those times...a cowboy hat. The other was my Davy Crockett faux-coonskin cap.

I am not exactly sure of the locale of this picture, and I will need to ask my parents, but I suspect this was at the married student housing at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where my dad was completing his Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Below is an ad for this car when it was first offered to the public by General Motors. Wouldn't it be nice to have one of these now?

A July Thundershower

We have been in a very unusual weather pattern for Colorado, where we have had beautiful mornings and early afternoons, followed by severe weather in the late afternoon. This has gone on for about three weeks, and has even included tornadoes, as indicated in an earlier post here. We also had about $13,000 in damage to the house, including the roof, all from hail. We are working to get that repaired, but it is a long process.

This afternoon's storm was a nice thunderstorm, not so severe, but gave us a good downpour and a lot of rolling thunder. I grabbed the trusty Olympus LS-10, and picked up a few seconds of sound. Below is some of it, and you can hear the rainfall, the thunder, and a neighbor's windchime. Enjoy!



Edited to add: This is the first audio file I have placed on this blog using a different host. I had been using podbean.com for hosting audio files and creating an embedded player. This one is using the Internet Archive at www.archive.com. They can host text, audio, video, and many other types of multimedia files. Their embedded player you see above has a volume control which is lacking on PodBean's. The Internet Archive also creates not only an embeddable player, but it allows you to choose a license for your files. The original file I uploaded was MP3 format, but they also create other versions automatically. My file resulted in not only the MP3, but also Ogg Vorbis, ZIP, M3U, and metadata files. It is totally free, and I highly recommend it. There is nothing wrong with PodBean, but I am liking the Internet Archive a lot!

The Wright Stuff

Tuesday, I posted about the Air New Zealand in flight safety video featuring crew members in nothing but a smile and body paint. (Well, the captain did also have a hat). Well, now we have another "naked on the airplane" story in the news.

Fifty-year-old Keith Wright, a man from the Bronx who is apparently bipolar, decided to strip naked on a US Airways flight from Charlotte to Los Angeles. He refused to keep a blanket on that was put on him by a flight attendant. Ultimately, two Los Angeles law enforcement personnel on the flight wrestled him down and the flight was diverted to Albuquerque, where Wright will likely be given a psychiatric evaluation.

Win 7 Beta Going Down For The Count

It's July 1, and those of you running the Windows 7 Beta may have noticed your machine shutting down every two hours. This is not a bug...it is Microsoft's way to get you to move over to the Release Candidate Code. Better do it quickly! It gets more severe starting August 1.

The RC will begin its shutdown routines on March 1, 2010. The commercial release of the OS will be October 22, 2009, so you should be in good shape. That is plenty of time to get the final product. One note though...it isn't an easy upgrade from beta to RC. A clean install is recommended (unless you had the foresight to run the beta in a virtual machine, that is).

104 KRBE Hit List

Like every other type of business, radio stations have tried to find ways to market themselves to their communities. Often, these efforts involve bumper stickers, contests, and billboards. Another method used over the years by Top-40 stations has been by publishing a playlist. I have seen these in forms of brochures, but here is one I had totally forgotten about.

Houston's 104.1 FM, KRBE used to publish their playlist on record sleves for 45 rpm singles. Here is one from May 2, 1978. There were some great songs on the top 40 that week, and it is hard to believe that it has been 31 years since these were current. At least it is to me. But then again, I am old!

Just take a look at some of these. Songs like Dust in the Wind, Baker Street, and Runnin' on Empty are there. But most noticeable is the fact that songs from the megahit movie, Saturday Night Fever dominated this chart of the disco fever era. I count at least four from that soundtrack. And take a look at #4. Thank You for Being a Friend by Andrew Gold went on to become the theme song for the television sitcom, The Golden Girls. The show's theme was a cover version by Cynthia Fee. There is also a song in the Top 40 from the movie Grease. You're The One That I Want by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John came in at #9 that week.

On the back among other things, is a list of the disc jockeys who spun those hits on KRBE. As always, you can click on the images to get larger versions.

Karl Malden - #8

The bad week to be a celebrity continues with the death of Oscar-winning actor, Karl Malden. Known for his role in A Streetcar Named Desire, and for a two-decade run as spokeman for American Express, Malden also starred in the TV Series, The Streets of San Francisco. He was 97.

Baloney Detection Kit

The late astronomer Carl Sagan wrote an excellent book about science entitled The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. One chapter of that book was laying out what Sagan called a Baloney Detection Kit. The idea is that there are reliable ways to test claims that will allow us to detect spurious and fallacious arguments, and use science to get at the truth of a theory or hypothesis.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation recently produced a video featuring Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, where Shermer takes Sagan's idea of a Baloney Detection Kit and lays out the concept for wider distribution. This video is almost 15 minutes long, but well worth the watching, given all of the claims and counter claims flying about these days.

The video is below, You can also download an MP3 audio file of this HERE (6.7 MB); or download a video Quicktime file HERE (122.4 MB).