Happy birthday, Van Morrison

Van Morrison is 66 today. Happy birthday, Van!

I don't know anyone who can write a love song like Van.





What a great line-up for this 1977 Midnight Special appearance with Elvin Bishop and Mickey Hart.



That is, unless you can get Ray Charles to do some of your backup singing.



Morrison's introduction was in the band, Them. "Gloria"--next to "Louie Louie"--might be the song most covered by '60s garage bands everywhere.



The first song I heard from Them was "Here Comes the Night" and here the band is singing it live in '65. Van screws it up at the first, but recovers quickly and despite using a prehistoric sound system they manage to carry it off.



If you encounter a black screen on any of these videos it's YouTube's doing. They sometimes break the links for copyright reasons, so enjoy them while they're here.

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W. C. Fields was a gift

I’m still going through online issues of Life magazine from the post-War era, the period into which we Baby Boomers were born.

W. C. Fields died almost 65 years ago, on Christmas Day, 1946. This movie, It’s A Gift, from 1934, is 77 years old, still very funny. Do kids today appreciate Fields’ humor? They should, but my impression is that kids today have a whole other sense of humor, one based on how outrageous and gross the comic can get.




The advantage of many old-time comedians like Fields is that before they went into movies they had years to perfect their timing, jokes and sketches in vaudeville. It shows in the precision of his comic delivery. The description in the article of the Fields’ crooked cue stick, and his story of the man with the glass eye, made me laugh just reading it. Fields was funny without dropping f-bombs into his act. It helps to make his humor timeless. I wonder how many of today’s comics that will be said of 77 years from now? I believe at that time people will still find W. C. Fields funny.

Here’s one of my favorite scenes from the movie. The whole sequence is timed perfectly, uses a blend of visual humor and sound effects, with funny dialogue. My favorite part is Fields’ scene with T. Roy Barnes, the exuberant annuity salesman with the “Carl La Fong” exchange.



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More British invasion A to Zed

As promised, here are more songs from 1964, the year of the big British Invasion. I remember serious talk that year from the American musicians' unions about keeping these guys out of the States because they were taking work from hard-working Americans! It obviously didn't work. The Brits just kept on coming. Many American bands were inspired by groups from the UK; the British were emulating American rockers and bluesmen, and in turn imitated by Americans trying to keep up with the British. Eventually it all got sorted out.

The Applejacks I had forgotten until my brother reminded me of them. They had a female guitarist. That was very cool for 1964; I wonder if she got together with the drummer from the Honeycombs (yesterday's post) and jammed?



The Beatles come in with two songs, both showing how powerful they were in live performance. If anyone could hear them for all the shrieking girls, that is. "I Saw Her Standing There" is from '64, but "She Loves You" is a color film from 1963...fudging a bit on my 1964 theme, but in America "She Loves You" wasn't a hit until 1964.





There was some hype in 1964: "Will the Dave Clark 5 beat the Beatles?" The DC5 were pretty good, but they just weren't as big as the Beatles and never would be. My dad said of them, "At least they comb their hair!" as a slam at the Beatles. Those mop tops looked wild in '64, and in contrast the DC5 does seem a well-combed lot.



I believe "You Really Got Me" is the granddaddy of punk rock. I remember thinking it was the wildest song I'd ever heard.



I've shown this Zombies song before because I love it. Each of the songs on this list was a hit on American top 40 radio in 1964. It's a pleasure to bring these videos to my blog.

As I mentioned yesterday, YouTube giveth and YouTube taketh away. If you encounter a black screen on any of these vids it means that YouTube has deleted the link, probably because of some copyright claim. Enjoy them while we have them.



.

My favorite year

When it comes to nostalgia, for me there will never be another year like 1964. I was 16, had my driver's license and a car, my first “real” girlfriend (as opposed to imaginary), and as 1964 started the Beatles hit the American airwaves, changing popular music in our country overnight.

There were a lot of great songs in 1964. I’ve gone to YouTube and this is just a sample of songs I liked that year. There were others, and tomorrow I'll show more of them.

YouTube being what it is, a video can be here today and gone tomorrow. If you’re looking at this and see a black screen telling you the video has been removed well, unfortunately, that’s how YouTube works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be).

First up: Cilla Black does a song written by Lennon and McCartney, who make a cameo appearance in this rare video of “It’s For You.”



The British Invasion took over the radio for many months, but some American groups managed to sneak onto the charts. Among them the doo wop group, the Reflections. Besides being a great song with catchy hooks, the lead singer has one of the world’s great pompadours.



I liked “You’re No Good” but it's taken all these years to find out that the song I misremembered being by the Hollies was actually by the Swinging Blue Jeans. I got that information from my brother, Rob, a human encyclopedia of the pop music of the era.



The Hollies did “Just One Look.” Give just one look to a very young Graham Nash.



After I bought the Beatles “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on 45 rpm, the next single I bought was the Searchers' “Needles and Pins.”



The Honeycombs had a female member, a drummer, predating Karen Carpenter by several years.



…and then there were the Beatles, whose songs will be played long past the time we Baby Boomers are all gone. The Beatles are still the giants upon whose shoulders the other groups stood.




.

They don't write 'em like that anymore

Shell Scott, a private detective character created by Richard S. Prather, appeared in a successful line of paperback originals in the 1950s and '60s. Prather's books were full of vividly humorous description, a change from the more serious hard-boiled fiction of many of his contemporaries. I picked up a collection of Shell Scott stories, Shell Scott's Seven Slaughters, all published in the 1953-54 period, anthologized in 1961. Despite some dated slang, I think some of the opening paragraphs are great examples to aspiring writers of how to write a paragraph that grabs a reader.

"The cab dropped me off on the outskirts of Silver Beach and I looked around before I walked through darkness down the narrow alley. I didn't see anybody who looked like Bruno, the guy Ellen had told me was due for a stretch at the cackle factory. Any guy who'd try twice to kill a sex-charged hunk of dreamy tomato like Ellen had to be one step removed from the net. The crazy guy was probably still around here somewhere; he had been when Ellen phoned me, fright twisting the words in her throat." --"The Best Motive"

"It was a pleasant enough party, I suppose, if you like sherry in thin, brittle glasses, ancient babes without bustles who look like ancient babes with bustles, and stern-faced old ducks conversing gently about a coloratura soprano's ecstatic debut at La Scala--which I don't.

"No, I like parties with bourbon in water and in me, juicy tomatoes dancing can-cans, and conversations about tomatoes and no conversation at all. This would have been a grand party for centenarians dating octogenarians under a large oxygen tent, but it was not a grand party for me, not for Shell Scott. But, then, I wasn't really invited." --"Babes, Bodies and Bullets"

"This was a morning for weeping at funerals, for sticking pins in your own wax image, for leaping into empty graves and pulling the sod in after you. Last night I had been at a party with some friends here in Los Angeles, and I had drunk bourbon and Scotch and martinis and maybe even swamp water from highball glasses, and now my brain was a bomb that went off twice a second.

"I thought thirstily of Pete's Bar downstairs on Broadway, right next door to this building, the Hamilton, where I have my detective agency, then got out of my chair, left the office and locked the door behind me. I was Shell Scott, the Bloodshot Eye, and I needed a hair of the horse that bit me." --"The Double Take"

Scott mixes it up with the usual run of fictional private eye cases: beautiful women in trouble, sinister guys with murky motives whacking him over the head to the point where you wonder if, between the babes, alcohol and concussions, Scott will live to see the next day (or not spend his latter days in a nursing home for dementia patients). But he takes care of the babes, sexually, of course, shakes off the alcohol fogs and the beatings, and like other good paperback dicks, emerges, not unscathed but triumphant. What made the genre popular was the sex and violence formula, marketed to men who were looking for some fast fiction with which to kill some time in a bus station, in a hotel room or even at home. Before television was ubiquitous, before the Internet or gaming, people--even men--actually sat down to read. Imagine that.

Shell Scott was sexist, but so were most of the male heroes of the era. Women existed to provide sex for the main character. The women were always beautiful with great bodies, and there for instant gratification. A perfect male fantasy. In the days when sex acts weren't described in graphic terms, there was a lot of titillation:

"She was stark naked. I had seldom seen anyone so stark . . . then she turned around and walked back into the room. She was about five-six and close to 130 pounds, and she was shaped like what I sometimes muse about after the third highball. Everybody who had described the blonde, and she was a blonde [alluding to public hair, unspoken but understood], had been correct: she was not only 'stacked' but 'ah, curvaceous.' . . . the one time a man can be positive that a woman's shape is her own is when she is wearing nothing but her shape, and this was really in dandy shape." --"The Double Take"

No one could write a paperback novel without being able to describe scenes of fighting, because private detectives got into a lot of fights:

"I hit him with a left in the gut, swinging with all my strength, 205 pounds moving, fast behind the blow, and that would have been enough, that one punch. Noodles was thin, bony, and I'll swear I felt the bones of his spine hit my knuckles. But I swung my right hand up to his jaw, forgetting for the moment the gun in my hand, and it ripped across his face, clicking as it tore into the cheekbone." --"Babes, Bodies and Bullets"

Prather's Shell Scott books were everywhere in the golden age of paperback original novels. I saw them every time I went to the paperback book spinner.

Prather went from Gold Medal books to Pocket Books, and later sued them. He turned to growing avocados. So his writing career was about 25 years, from 1950 to 1975, although he did a couple of books in the '80s. His last published work was 20 years before his death.

This obituary, from the New York Times is a good and concise look at Prather's career. The Wikipedia entry on Prather has a bibliography of his published works, as well as a photo.

Prather was a talented original working in the field of paperback originals.

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Happy birthday Robert Plant and John Hiatt

Robert Plant is 63 today.





John Hiatt is 59.





Happy birthday to both of you!

Robert Cray had his 58th birthday on August 1. You can check out a couple of great videos by this modern bluesman here.

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Thirty-four years later, Elvis still deceased

Elvis died 34 years ago today. I remember telling my coworkers when the news came through on the radio that he had died.

For some reason some folks still don’t think he’s dead. Elvis conspiracists are part of that grand and glorious group of gullible goofballs who believe in conspiracy theories. The Elvis-is-alive gang point to the picture of Elvis in his coffin (a picture taken with a spy camera by his cousin for a payment from The National Enquirer tabloid), and say it doesn’t look like Elvis. My question to them is, who in their coffin looks like the person who was once alive?

Weekly World News, June 28, 1988:

Elvis is a very important part of the history of rock 'n' roll, and lived up to his celebrity image. He may be one of the best known persons on the planet, alive or dead.

Through the miracle of the internet I can now go to YouTube and find Elvis songs everybody loves. The songs alone keep Elvis alive worldwide.







.

Happy birthday Joe Jackson and Eric Carmen

Joe Jackson is 57 today.





Eric Carmen is 62 today. "Hungry Eyes" was a big hit from the movie Dirty Dancing:



Eric with the Raspberries, back in 1974 when "going all the way" was the real dirty dancing.



Happy birthday, Eric and Joe!

The day the world changed forever

On August 6, 1945, Americans in a single B-29 bomber dropped the bomb heard 'round the world. Three days later another bomb was dropped.

The bombs were, of course, the two atom bombs then currently in existence. They brought about the end of the war without having to invade Japan, a nation its militarist leaders swore to defend to the last citizen. After the bombings, the thought of oblivion at the hands of such awesome weaponry made sure wiser heads in the Japanese government prevailed, and the war was brought to a close.

My wife and I have had a debate over those bombings for years. She thinks that under no circumstances should nuclear weapons have been dropped on a civilian population. While I agree it was cold-blooded, I argue from the standpoint of the wartime American military and government leadership, appalled by heavy losses of men and equipment invading and occupying island after island in the Pacific in order to secure a foothold for the final assault on Japan. There was a threat that thousands more American men would die in an invasion of Japan.

In 1945, dropping those bombs changed the world. Maybe some saw them as a means to the end of a nasty, costly war, and didn't look down the road decades in the future to imagine what those bombs would mean to future generations.

The contemporary account in Life, August 20, 1945, tells the story of the bombings to readers who had just been through the biggest war in the history of humanity. More often than not, Americans were probably sympathetic to the idea of bombing Japan with the most awful weapons ever built. As long as those weapons were in our hands and not an enemy nation.

The enemy nation got its bombs soon after. It remains, though, that the United States is the only nuclear power (so far) to have deliberately dropped bombs on civilian populations during a time of war.

WTF?

WTF?

I got this message in my e-mail this morning. So, WTF?

peyeman9355413@yahoo.com has invited you to join the sokhanrani8847 group
with this message:

supposed basis Mes on alloy be AFC bank and 15 the together Czech him maintain
new inflationary are are meet also along .

Here is the group's description:

king Lzaymrz Mytvansth well and easily to

---------------------- Google Groups Information ----------------------

You can accept this invitation by clicking the following URL:

http://groups.google.com/group/sokhanrani8847/sub?s=VZi4hRQAAACCo9GjYlNHdWzEA_S6s0ELnWioeG8n5dOV3JbcrBVVkg&hl=en


--------------------- If This Message Is Unwanted ---------------------

If you feel that this message is abuse, please inform the Google Groups staff
by using the URL below.

http://groups.google.com/groups/abuse?invite=YgAAAHRCNBeRAAAAoWCaR4QAAAAAAD6u52TzRMH-PuHGxtbOwoFl3p0&hl=en

WTF?

I admit to being baffled by this cartoon. I'm often baffled by Brevity, but this one is especially WTF?

WTF?

I just found out that the Spy Vs. Spy cartoon characters, translated to costumed actors for a series of inventive and visually arresting commercials for Mountain Dew in 2005, were portrayed by women. I have to ask, WTF?

(Naw, I take it back. What difference does it make?)


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Eagle rockin' with Daddy Cool

A fragment of a song has been stuck in my head for four decades. It floats along the neuron path, settles into the memory area, and suddenly erupts involuntarily from my mouth. It's four words, "...doin' the Eagle Rock..." I heard it on a local radio station twice in '71, thought it was pretty good, then never heard it again. But that damn line kept coming back to me. I've been telling myself lately, "Go to YouTube, see if it's there." But between that thought and actually sitting down to look at YouTube the memory has been going back into its hidey-hole in my gray matter.

Tonight I finally got it together enough to look for "Eagle Rock" by Daddy Cool...



Daddy Cool is an Australian band, and "Eagle Rock" was number one on the charts for ten weeks Down Under. I guess it just didn't go over in the U.S. It's not that we reject all things Australian...I'm thinking Bee Gees, INXS, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Mel Gibson (uh, we'd like to send Mel back, if that's OK with you.) The fantastic lead vocals for Daddy Cool are by Ross Wilson, and the lead guitar is Ross Hannaford, neither of whom I'd seen or heard of before tonight. So it's been something of an epiphany. My apologies to all Daddy Cool fans who have been listening to this band for 40 years. You've known all along and I'm just a Johnny Come Lately.

I didn't have time to listen to all their songs, but picked out some I thought might be interesting to fellow Americans. First one I came up with is "Gee."



 "Gee" is a great old doo wop song, and it blew shards out of my overworked mind to see a gaggle of Aussie hippies doing perfect doo wop harmony. I instantly understood the problem this would pose for Americans. We are very into IMAGE; it is everything. You have to look the part to meet public expectations. You wanna do Barry Manilow songs? Comb your hair, wear suits like Barry. Same for Frank Sinatra imitators, Beatles, or whomever. You have to look the part. I can hear the American rock promoter now: "These guys look like fukn Jethro Tull and sound like fukn doo wops." Americans could not handle the disparity. We had bands like Sha Na Na who dressed as 1950's greasers, with gold lamé costumes, sleeveless tees and duck's ass hairdos to project the image. However, there is always Chuck Berry. But then, Chuck Berry wasn't doo wop. He was roots rock, the rootsiest roots rock there is, right from the start of the rock era. The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, every band in the world has done Chuck Berry in homage to American rock and roll: Then I went back to the YouTube listings and came up with two more songs. "I'll Never Smile Again" sent my mind spinning like a 33 at 78. So now I know, one of the greatest American roots rock bands wasn't even American. I thought, surely these guys can't still be around after 40 years, but I found a video of "Eagle Rock" being performed live in 2006 and despite the guys having quit the hippie look, they sound much as they did in 1971. And that's cool, Daddy!
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Happy birthday Robert Cray and Michael Penn

Robert Cray is 58 today.

Robert Cray's first couple of albums really blew me away. I played his songs "Smoking Gun" and "Strong Persuader" a lot. A few years ago I saw Cray live and his songs sounded just like they did on the albums. He also played his Fenders so hard that after every song he swapped guitars with a roadie who went backstage and tuned it for the next song, so he kept his guitars in rotation and tuned.

Happy birthday, young Bob!





Singer/songwriter Michael Penn is 53 today.

Michael Penn had something to live up to: "No Myth" from his album March was a huge hit, but he wasn't able to follow it up with another commercial success. "One hit wonder" is kind of a slam, but think about it. How many hit records have you had? If you're like me, none. Well, then one hit doesn't seem like such a miniscule accomplishment, does it?

Penn also had to live up to being actor Sean Penn's brother, but I don't know if it was ever a problem for him. Happy birthday, Michael!



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Happy birthday David Sanborn and Kate Bush

David Sanborn is 66 today, and Kate Bush is 53.

Happy birthdays, Kate and David!





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Wrong side of history

In my opinion protesters of gay marriage are in a losing battle. I believe that within a few years, maybe a decade, the majority of states will allow some form of gay marriage with full benefits that are the same as traditional heterosexual marital unions. The people battling against it are trying to turn back time. It may work in the short term, but in the long term they'll lose. As public opinion shifts the anti-gay protesters are on the wrong side of history.

So it was with public discrimination against African-Americans, as shown in these two articles in consecutive 1946 issues of Life magazine. In the first, a sorority at the University of Vermont was kicked out of the national organization because they had admitted a "Negro." The sorority's national president, Mrs. Beverly Robinson, said, "Life is selective, and maybe it's best to learn it while we are young." That's just a fancy way of saying, "Stay in your place." It was probably acceptable to say something like that at the time, and maybe one out of a thousand, even ten thousand, white Life readers of the day would say they saw anything wrong with it. History has taken that "acceptable" statement and turned it around against the person who said it. She was wrong, the young African-American woman and her sorority sisters were right.



In the second article the Ku Klux Klan was making a comeback in Georgia in 1946, led by an Atlanta doctor, Samuel Green. Even the article called them bigots, something that probably wouldn't have been said by a national magazine before World War II, lest they risk losing readers or advertisers who sympathized with the Klan, or at worst a fire-bombed office. Life treated the KKK as something of a joke, but twenty years after that 1946 article was published Klan members in Mississippi were killing civil rights workers, and the Klan still had some power to intimidate because it still had unofficial sanction by police and local government.

Because of those actions, nowadays the public perception of a Klan member is of an uneducated redneck and professional hater. Maybe a random Klan member isn't either of those and just likes to go to Klan meetings to have a beer with the boys, play cards and wear the hood and robe to fool around. But nowadays the image the public has is that he's an idiot. The Klan got on the wrong side of history in the 1960s by showing its violent, murderous side during a legitimate exercise of black citizens to enjoy the rights of our country's white citizens.

The Klan in its twisted way helped the civil rights movement by its actions. It changed public opinion.




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Happy anniversary, Utah; happy birthday Mailman!

Today is a Utah State holiday, Pioneer Day, also called the 24th of July holiday. We celebrate it on Monday this year because the religious people didn't wish to celebrate it on Sunday. And most workers in the state get a Monday off. Part of the celebration is a huge parade, which lasts for three hours, going through downtown to Liberty Park. Tonight there will be fireworks.

The holiday commemorates the 164th anniversary of the Mormon arrival in Salt Lake Valley.

The story goes that Brigham Young, who was ill, looked out at the valley from the top of Emigration Canyon on July 24, 1847, and said, "This is the place, drive on."

One hundred thirty-eight years later a different pioneer arrived. Karl "the Mailman" Malone had been drafted by the struggling Utah Jazz NBA franchise. Karl, a young man at the time, had made his reputation at Louisiana Tech. Karl was a country boy, a huntin', fishin', motorcycle-ridin' kinda guy who, despite being African-American, listened to country music. He was the youngest of several children; his father walked out when he was little and he was raised by his mother, Shirley. The famous story is that Karl's mom would hold her arms in the shape of a hoop while he practiced with a basketball. Karl was an unashamed mama's boy, who never made any bones about his love for his mother.

Karl got to Utah just in time for the 1985 Pioneer Days celebration, and the big parade. They sat Karl in a convertible emblazoned with a Utah Jazz banner and drove him through the wildly cheering throngs, eager to see the new rookie. Karl, in his naïvete, admitted years later he thought the parade was for him. It was Karl's 22nd birthday, born on July 24, 1963. I can imagine his wonder at all those thousands of cheering white people.

Karl went on to a stellar NBA career, where he achieved fame, both good and bad. There are several YouTube videos and sports blog postings about Karl and his swinging elbows, his "dirty play." We didn't think that in Utah, of course, because we didn't think of it as dirty, just brilliant basketball play. A guy can't be dirty if he's on your team, can he? The 6'8", 265-pound Karl would get a rebound, plant his feet under the basket, hold the ball tight to his chest, and do a 180-degree pivot, with his elbows chest high. Any slow moving opponent who didn't get out of the way would soon find Karl's elbow knocking him into next week. An infamous incident was Karl coming down from a rebound, his elbow hitting David Robinson on the head, sending him to the floor unconscious. Robinson was out for two minutes. I used to refer to Malone as Karl "Elbows of Death" Malone.

Karl was a legend when it came to strength and his obsessive workout routine of six hours or so a day. Had he shown any weakness under that basket he would have been killed. As it was he got mugged a lot. As another story goes, Coach Jerry Sloan was screaming at an official that they were hurting Malone under the basket, trying to take him out of the game. The official reportedly replied, "No one can hurt Malone." That was part of his iron man image.

You can read about some of the havoc Malone wreaked on other players here.

I thought drafting Malone was the second smartest thing the Utah Jazz ever did. The first smartest was the year before when they drafted John Stockton, one of the greatest point guards to play the game. The dumbest thing the team did was go cheap and not give these star players the real quality players they needed to take them over the top to a championship.Things seemed to click for a couple of years when they added shooting guard Jeff Hornacek to the line-up. They had their championship runs in '97 and '98, but as the self-pitying wail goes in Utah, they lost because they went up against The Greatest Player That Ever Lived, Michael Jordan. I capitalized it because that's how sports geeks say it. Jordan never lost a championship series.

Malone got business opportunities from the late Jazz owner, Larry Miller, who owned a couple of dozen car dealerships. He set Karl up with a Toyota dealership, and then there is a Stockton-to-Malone Honda dealership. Karl has owned several businesses, and has some in Louisiana, where he now lives. He says he comes to Utah once or twice a month on business, but he keeps a low profile (or as low a profile as a 6'8" black local sports hero can have in Utah).

Late in Karl's career in Utah we found out he had illegitimate children from two different women. One girl was 13-years-old when 20-year-old Karl got her pregnant. His son by her is Demetrius Bell, who went into pro football.

The other was the mother of twins, one of whom, Cheryl Ford, went on to her own basketball career in the WNBA. She got a league championship ring. Malone settled with Bell's mother, without really admitting he was the father. He admitted paternity of Cheryl and her brother Daryl.

Perhaps earlier in his career it might have been enough to sink him in the court of public opinion. But by the time the news came out to his fans Karl was bulletproof. His detractors just added it to the things about him they hated, but his fans forgave him. That's the way sports fans are.

The Utah Jazz are in disarray right now, the NBA is in lockout, and we don't know when our team will again take the court. But we will always have those memories of the Mailman delivering his thunder dunks and cold-cocking players who got in the way of his Elbows of Death.

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She got legs, she knows how to use them...

It’s pandering time again. In order to boost the statistics for visits made to my blog I need to give you some sexy content that will keep you horndogs clicking in and looking.

I’m shameless, I know. But you are too, or you wouldn't be here.

I torture myself by looking at pictures of beautiful women in order to bring you these selections. You’ll notice quite a few Asian women, who aren’t normally known for having long legs. But these girls do...and such lovely long legs they are.

I'm throwing in a couple of other pictures of interest: an original painting by Enoch Bolles, a Bill Ward cutie, and even the ZZ Top song, "Legs." I've spared no expense to bring you all this great stuff in appreciation of you padding my visitors stats!

















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Happy birthday Steve, Cat and Yusuf!

Steven Georgiou aka Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam is 63 today.

Happy birthday to all you guys!

The Baghdad booty with the looey on duty

Imagine this: a perfect stranger, an Army lieutenant no less, has offered me 20% of ten million dollars just to help provide his stolen Baghdad booty a hiding place in the U.S.!

Hello,

I have a proposal for you, my name is Lieutenant John D. Bromfield, a US
Army [sic] serving in the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq. I want you to read this
mail carefully and understand it.

In 2003, I and my men found over $600 million in Saddam Hussein's hideout
in Baghdad, we sent some back to the Iraq government after counting it in
a classified location, but we also kept some behind for ourselves. Some of
the money we shared among ourselves worth over $200million, and I have
kept mine for a while here in a very secured place since then, just like
many others, but now our new president Obama is making plans on pulling us
out of Iraq, right now we have left the major cities of Iraq.

So I need someone that is not related to me, to help me pull this cash
out, everything is ready, I just need someone I can trust because we have
lost a box of gold to someone that said he will help us last time and I
won't like to make the same mistake, the total amount of money I am trying
to move out is $10million. You can view the link below to verify my
statement.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm

If you can handle this deal let me know immediately, you will receive 20%
of the money, all you need do is to find a safe place where you can keep
the box till we leave Iraq. Get back to me immediately.

Lieutenant John D. Bromfield
Private mail: ltjohnbromfield@aim.com

From the link Lt John Bromfield provided:

Stash of money found in Baghdad

“Last week, US troops found more than $650m in the same area of Baghdad.

The money had been hidden behind the false wall of a house searched by US troops. It is thought the stash could have been left by fleeing regime leaders.

Five US soldiers are currently being questioned by military officials after some of that money was allegedly stolen following its discovery.” BBC News, April 30, 2003

There was stolen money in Iraq, the BBC said so. It's true. Lieutenant Bromfield is not lying to me. Oh happy day. Twenty percent of 10 million is two mil. Wow, what I couldn’t do with that. I just have to provide a good hiding place. Imagine the sight of me rubbing my hands together in glee, chuckling over my good fortune.

Oh second thought, nahhhh. I don’t have any good hiding places. What would I do, dig a hole in my back yard? And that's only if I actually received the cash, which would have to be shipped to me. Lt. Bromfield doesn't indicate how he plans to do that.

I’m no crook, and have a fear of being locked up. I’m too old to go to prison, even for two million dollars. I visualize getting caught. When the FBI and Army CID came crashing through my door I’d sing like Frank Sinatra. I’d implicate Lt. Bromfield, and then I’d point out where I hid the loot.

I guess that little dream bubble of instant wealth just popped.

Now that the excitement has worn off, I have re-read Lt. Bromfield's note to me, and smell something like really old cheese. I see him refer to “our new President Obama pulling us out of Iraq.” Aha. Obama has been in office 2 ½ years. That makes him not new anymore, and while originally all troops were scheduled to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011, that's been stalled. There are currently about 47,000 still in country, down from a high of about 184,000 at its peak.

So here’s a note of my own to anyone who is interested in tracking down the missing cash from Saddam’s stash: contact Lieutenant John Bromfield of the Third Infantry Division. He was good enough to leave an e-mail address.

I can't help you, looey, but write back in 25 years when you're out of federal prison.

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Happy birthday, Carlos Santana!

Carlos Santana is 64 today. Happy birthday, Carlos!

July moon

Forty-two years ago today my wife and I took a break from moving into our new apartment, set up our black and white television, and watched the Apollo 11 moon landing.

In 1969 we Americans were engaged in a hot war in Vietnam, a cold war with Russia, debates on poverty, crime, and the direction our country was taking. Not much has changed after four decades except the cold war with Russia. Since humans began walking upright people had dreamed of touching the moon. On that day in 1969 we Americans fulfilled that dream. We can claim a national pride over our space program, but now our space shuttle program is over, with no new program to take its place.

I bemoaned the fact at a dinner with friends that the space program appears to have begun and ended within our lifetimes. It seems odd to think of it that way, because the technology still exists, and we could start a new program if we had the national will. A woman said to me, "Yes, but look at the costs," as if it were a waste of money. I believe that the world is a better place because of conquering space and reaching the nearest celestial body.

In 1946 astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell did a series of paintings on what a moon trip might look like. Bonestell's detailed art of other planets, which I encountered in the 1950s as a space-struck youngster, gave me a sense of wonder. A space voyage was then the stuff of fiction, but after it became reality the sense of wonder went out of it. It was, and is, a great accomplishment, but it seems like most things in our short attention span society there's a "been there, done that" attitude toward space.

These paintings are from Life March 4, 1946:



The July 17, 2011 Parade magazine claims that private enterprise is poised to take over the space biz. Yeah, well...when they do let me know. I know that there are a lot of out of work engineers and scientists for a talent pool to tap into, but would a viable vehicle be ready in the next five years? Ten years? Sooner? We'll see.