Surfing dog

Here's a video I think will bring a smile to your lips. This guy just loves to have fun.

Surfing dog

Dulary's journey

Today Dulary the elephant is en route from the Philadelphia Zoo, where she has lived for the last 41 years, to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. Big Day! Zoo officials have a great attitude about sending her and I think this kid does a good job of summing up the attitude for most of the locals in this CBS video.

You can leave a message for Dulary here. You may think, "Why bother? She's an elephant, for chrissake." Naturally, I think it makes a difference. There is more than one way of hearing.

Bass in the bathtub updade

The bass speaks

The bass is out of the bathtub. The other day we had a buyer. It was love a first sight. He bought it, half up front and years to pay, no interest, but when he got it home he freaked out. He plays for the Reno Philharmonic and it turned out that it wasn't as loud as his current bass, which was a deciding factor. Plus, I think he decided that he couldn't afford it. The poor guy recently moved to a double wide in the valley after his divorce. His wife got the house in Tahoe. As he put it, she got the gold, he got the shaft. Anyway, of course we refunded his dough but crap. But now that the fiddle is out of the tub, neither of us have the heart to put it there again. It just seems wrong. It has such a heartbreakingly beautiful sound. Now we have to find it a home. We were going to take it to LA as Bonhams and Butterfields will be there doing appraisals next month, but decided against it. We wouldn't do a consignment with them anyway. Brad (the musician) gave us a San Francisco contact who seems better suited to our needs. At this point, we are not sure what to ask for it, eight to ten thousand was always the upper end. You know how these things are. You get what you pay for but you also only get what people are willing to pay. Either way, it is a beautiful instrument, perhaps as much as two hundred years old, solid, hand-crafted wood and in great shape, but Lee's x-dirty beatnik bebop bass player dad, heavily modified the neck. It is ... at this point in it's star-crossed life, after 50 years in someone's basement, or was that good fortune? ... a jazz bass. Want to buy a great bass? We will make you a sweeeeeeet deal.

Strange days

I have been too swamped the last few days to spend any time on line, but I always have my camera with me so here are a few strange things I came upon in recent days.

I can't imagine how hanging strips of toilet paper from the supermarket ceiling is suppose to be attractive to people but obviously the manager at the local Raley's finds it so. To me it merely underscores the obvious connection between eating and shitting.

The Salvation Army had this neat item for sale. No. I didn't buy it. The Raley offered enough virtual reality for my "taste" this week, thank you.

As I do from time to time, I visited the grave of the unknown baby boy who died in the '60s. There is no name on his marker and he only lived a couple of days. I'm not the only one in town who looks in on him. The cartoon drawn on the scrap of wood is new since my last visit but I was alarmed to see tire tracks across the lower, right edge of his tiny resting place. The images came out very bleached and over exposed which seems to fit the melancholy shrouding his little grave.

Victory for horses!

Here's a happy update...



Last Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (277-137) to restore a 34-year-old ban on the commercial sale and slaughter of America's wild horses and burros (H.R. 503 - the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act). On Wednesday, the bill to ban the sale and transport to slaughter of all American horses cleared a critical Senate committee by a decisive 15-7 vote. There is more work ahead but these victories move us even closer to banning horse slaughter in the United States permanently.

Thank you.

H.R. 503 horses slaughter ban

Frenzy

I have been way too busy lately and feel half crazy from the frenzy. Things are finally beginning to wind down but I have no energy tonight to anything more than check in. Doing graphics and editing makes me crazy after a certain point, and over the last week, I went past that certain point.

Among other things, I have been working with some friends to put a show together. We call ourselves the 5th Night Company. We are planning to do three shows this year, each one of the 5th Friday of the month. As there are only four this year, a 5th Friday is something like a blue moon. The first 5th Friday of the year was on March 30th but we started too late to catch it. The next 5th Friday falls on June 29th. That's the one we're shooting for, then August 31st and November 30th. As I can only maintain my marginal sanity if I take things one day at a time, this kind of thinking can quickly become just too much but we shall see.

Naturally the event will be at Comma Coffee. Thanks to June, the place is becoming the hub of Carson City's scene. Woo. But kidding aside, she is a one woman, downtown arts renovation project. So what is 5th Friday you might ask? It is a performance opportunity for actors, poets, musicians, dancers, comics, puppeteers, anyone who dares to be interesting.

So that's it. Now_I_must_rest.