Room 1103, Hotel Angeleno, Bel Air, CA

My room looks directly on the weird and cool Getty Museum. Somewhere nearby in these gentle rolling hills O J Simpson once sat in a  Bronco's back seat with a gun to his head and could not work up the courage to spare us all from reality television.

Dangling men on the San Mateo Bridge

I didn't get my camera ready in time to get a dramatic photo of a helicopter hovering and lowering men onto a massive high-voltage power-line tower, but you can see the men that had just been lowered onto the adjacent one. Pretty badass.

San Ramon PAC, San Ramon, CA

I'm the devil checking in Khaddafi...or Qaddaffi...or whatever...

30 miles east of Sea-Tac...

Let's see, all the usual Seattle stuff you always see: raining? Check. Independent  coffee joint? Check. Cactus? Check...uh, wait a minute....

Five day west coast trip.

Not taking the barbell. Off to Dulles!

Jo loves it when My hair does this...

Early...leaving Hartford.

Most tables are by the window for the view

A commonality which seems to have escaped the Hartford, Connecticut Hilton's restaurant.

Seriously, what the f is with Spartanburg? Crime City!

Unexplained Wilmington

Off to Wilmington on a little plane

The Barking Crab, Boston Harbor

Jon and I ate pounds of delicious lobster there the other day. Yum!

Rm. 325, Boston Long Wharf Marriott

Foggy Boston harbor.  Probably full of soggy Bostonians, shattered by the Red Sox epic collapse last night, which actually set an all-time record for failure. Hard to do after all these years of baseball.

Three hour drive this morning

Athens, TN to Asheville. And so far super foggy AND sunny the whole way. Weird, but pretty.

Days Inn, Athens, TN

Not only are these pictures askew to slightly different degrees, they are firmly bolted that way; you can't straighten them.

:)

The Gratuity is Entitle to Him

This is how Rich and I look...

...when the venue screws up and doesn't bring enough transpo and we have to be left behind to figure out our own way. Our own way seems to involve the spacious back seat of a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car. Cheers!

I've never had a cab with a yoga instructor before

Midnight would fetch this thing...

...until both of our legbones were worn to toothpicks.

Black History Month

Rendered in automotive hood glitter. In front of the Spanish market down the street.  Love that market.

What we share with Peyton Manning

Sadly, it's not his paycheck. But, today being the start of the NFL season, and Peyton being one of the biggest fishes in the pond, the big news is the fact that he is out for the foreseeable future due to having yet another neck surgery. Why neck surgery? A crippling injury, no doubt? Pounded by some 300-lb. defensive beast into the ground and playing with smashed vertebra, perhaps?

Nope. He has what we have: rotting neck bones that lead to false pain and numbness in his neck, shoulders, back, and extremities.  Except he's Peyton Manning and they cannot wait to operate on him with the latest techniques to make him feel all better.   So, Pop, I don't know if this is what they would do to you, but if so, it seems to work for Peyton! At least we'll see. Wish I had an NFL medical plan....

You guys still in a dry spell?

We aren't.  Scenes from Leesburg Pike.

Amusing and easy idea

Stumbled across a very simple idea amusingly done: viewer submitted photos of people holding CD or LP album covers in front of themselves or others in order to incorporate themselves into the gestalt of the album art.  Most are not as amusing as this, but all are clever. Somebody somewhere must weed out the lame ones.

One of those weird sunny/rainy days

Been like this for an hour. Odd. But kinda cool.

Free tickets!

One of Carol's fancy clients has season tickets to the Skins and --in the way of the idle rich-- can hardly ever be bothered with going to the actual games.  Or selling them. So she mentions yesterday to Carol that she has tickets going to waste for the Skins game with my Buccaneers last night.  She gladly dumps them off on Carol, I get them from her, and me and Jack Rowles, fellow Stepper, end up with great free seats to a meaningless pre-season game. I had already made the sad calculation that going to a game was not in the budget this year and hadn't even looked at tickets --even though this was my only chance of seeing my team this year-- so serendipity works out in my favor.   I have now managed to see my generally unrecognised and unheralded football team for four straight years. These are the second best seats I've had and they were FREE! Woohoo! Too bad Jo couldn't go. Especially since her stupid Skins made a comeback to win with a minute left right after my team made a comeback to take the lead with TWO minutes left. Exciting. And meaningless. Like so many of the best things in life.