Gas station outside Seguin

I saw this abandoned, old gas station along U.S. Route 90 outside Seguin on the way to Kerrville, and I pulled over and snapped it on the way back home. It really reminds me of something one might find on old Route 66. I have many more like this in my "Gasoline" set at flickr.

Rick Astley lives!!!

Rick Astley has somehow mangaged to escape the prolific and successful (as of late) Grim Reaper, and he is not yet dead. So, I guess that means he is never gonna give us up, and we will be together forever. I'm pretty sure these are two different songs:

The Clash at Shea Stadium

Prior to Shea Stadium show, October 1982 (pic by Bob Gruen)
In 1982, the Clash were on tour in America, promoting their Combat Rock album. Performance footage in this video was recorded on October 13th, 1982, when the band opened for the Who at New York's Shea Stadium amid falling rain and wild jeering from Who fans:


During Combat Rock tour in '82 (pic by Bob Gruen)

"I'm going to buy your songs one day."

Peace to Michael Jackson. Nothing left to prove. A life even more tragic than Elvis'? How is that possible? The comparisons will come, don't you know. This will be repeated ad nauseum for the next few days, but--the King of Pop is dead. Love live the King!

A river of a novel

The illustrations are by Edward Windsor Kemble, and were included in the original, 1884 publication of the novel.

The French call an episodic, wandering novel a "roman fleuve" - the novel as a river. Such is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I've just reread it and have a couple of thoughts. First, being a little bit older and more experienced now than when I last read the book, I felt really sorry for Huck, not yet fourteen-years-old during the year of the novel's events, 1839. Despite being raised in hellish conditions by an abusive, alcoholic father in dirt-floor squalor and famine-level poverty, he is unfailingly clever (smart even) and surprisingly sensitive and sweet. Jim is treated so poorly throughout (and depicted so stereotypically, I assume), he almost doesn't register as a human being. Is he simply a stereotype, or were enslaved Africans really like that?


Secondly, Ernest Hemingway was absolutely right about the final chapters:

If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.

Hemingway is also quoted as saying the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" after Jim loses his freedom. That is a very accurate description. I found Tom Sawyer and his elaborate schemes tiresome, so I read through those parts very quickly. I kind of like the way this person succinctly puts it:

Read for my Mark Twain class, started on 2/2 and finished on 2/7. I loved the first 31 chapters of this book. LOVED. Huck is just the greatest character, and Jim is awesome, and yes. Unfortunately, in chapter 32, Tom Sawyer saunters in and has to mess it up for everyone. What a little assh*le. Go away, Tom. No one likes you.

Yet the passages where Huck and Jim are out on the raft, floating down the Mississippi River ("the monstrous big river"), are prose as poetry, beautiful and stunning. Their drifting journey down the Mississippi "may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature" (source).

From chapter 19 ("The Duke and the Dauphin Come Aboard"):

"Two or three nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely...Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time...It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened..."

The I Love Lucy theme

Desilu
Desi Arnaz serenades Lucille Ball with the theme to I Love Lucy (by Harold Adamson and Eliot Daniel) on the season two, May 11, 1953, episode, "Lucy's Last Birthday":


The familiar theme (without lyrics):


And once again with lyrics, this time as a studio track:

R.I.P. Ed McMahon

On The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the '70s
Ed McMahon, TV icon, is gone. When I was growing up, he was everywhere on television. I think at one time during the early 1980s he was on The Tonight Show, Star Search, and TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes, as well as hosting the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. But he will probably be most remembered (at least by moi) for his repartee and banter with Johnny Carson, all those many, late nights: