Monthly Archives: October 2024

Last week our neighbor, Barb, asked Jenny & I if we wanted to carve pumpkins before Halloween.  We said “Sure!”  I got carried away and said “and then we can watch ‘The Great Pumpkin’ together!’  There was a pause before she sighed, shrugged, and said “ok.”  It felt like she expected to sit in a sincere pumpkin patch and wait all night while all the other kids went trick-or-treating.  I guess my Charlie Brown TV traditions don’t appeal to everybody.  After we took these pics, Barb was a good sport and watched The Great Pumpkin with us.

I always thought that “rhetoric” was a word to describe other words that were being used to brainwash, fluster, and cloud the mind. I’m familiar with the phrase ‘that’s a rhetorical question,’ and I know I’m not supposed to answer literally or quickly. Earlier this year Robin Reames wrote a book, The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times.  It goes deeper into rhetoric, and I’m hungry to learn more about it. Thanks Carlos for taking this selfie and going on this journey with me.

If you don’t get the joke, click the link below to watch the video. Warren Zevon was recording cool riffs before Kid Rock was stealing them.  “You better stay away from him, he’ll rip your lungs out, Jim…”  –WEREWOLVES OF LONDON!

There were skeletons twice as tall as us, candles in the stairway with notes to our loved ones that we miss, mariachi music outside, and t-shirts to commemorate the event.  Jenny & I loved our time at the Day of the Dead celebration, and we have the smiles to prove it.

Even if he’d never played the rumpled cigar smoking (seemingly) absent-minded detective, Columbo, this would STILL be a great photo of Peter Falk.  I can imagine him falling asleep after sketching for hours, waking up and sketching some more, and only leaving his sofa/bed for food or thumbtacks to hang more sketches on the wall.

We thought the well was dry, we thought the pantry was bare, we thought the gas tank was empty – we were wrong.  Awkward Family Photos released a game a few weeks ago to recycle more embarrassing photos to coincide with movies that came out when I was a teenager.  Heaven help us (that was an 80′s movie, too.)

This song always chokes me up.  I was listening to it on my walk across campus this morning & if someone would have said ‘hey man are you ok?’ I would have shrugged my shoulders and looked the other way.  I don’t know how the lead singer gets through it without crying.  Two other great songs by this band are All Your Favorite Bands and Time Spent In Los Angeles.  The music videos are really cool too.

A teenager beat a 40-year-old video game.  If I had just stopped writing that sentence before adding “video game,” at the end, it would be disturbing– but I think it’s cool that a youngster was still drawn to a game that was in arcades when I was a young man. Here’s the story.

Mapache performed on KEXP in 2018– but they sounded like a band from Laurel Canyon in the 1970′s to me.  This is that performance.

I check patients in and out of a clinic all day, and when my eyes get tired of looking at doctor’s appointments, I go to a campfire.