BB at the Umeå Jazz Festival, Umeå, Sweden in 1986. Check out the pianist and trumpet player (using rubber toilet plunger as mute, if I’m not mistaken) as well.
Sweetwater Saloon was a much-beloved Marin County (California) music venue for 30 years until it closed down 5 years ago. It has now reopened in the old Masonic Hall in Mill Valley and is ramping up its schedule. Last night I was on my way home around 8PM and I stopped in to take a look. Well — Ausitin Leone and friends were scheduled, there was a $5 cover, and what can a poor boy do?
It was a great night. The room is twice as big as the old place and doesn’t have the cozy ambiance, but it feels good, muchly helped by leaving the rough timber ceiling beams (joists for upper story) uncovered. Full house, happy people, great rock and roll and blues by the hometown band.
This is the single most useful site/blog on the web for me. I can’t say how many useful things this blog has turned me on to. It’s like the electronic Whole Earth Catalog, but what’s better is that it uses no paper, and it’s daily.
Kevin Kelly, ex-Whole Earth Review editor, founding editor at Wired mag, author, photographer, explorer, runs this operation, with daily reviews of useful stuff.
“Cool tools really work. A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We only post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted. Tell us what you love.”
Easiest way to get there is to go to kk.org, then click on “Cool Tools” at the left.
Willie Brown (Speaker of the California State Assembly for 15 years, San Francisco mayor in the late ’90s) must have a TV show. I’ve seen him often at a table in Cafe Roma in North Beach, SF, with major size video cameras filming him, when I get there, around 7 AM. This morning he’s meeting with SF’s new mayor Ed Lee and a third politico guy who’s always here with Willy. They’re sitting about 15 feet away. Wille’s telling stories and there’s a lot of laughter
Willie is a beautiful man, he’s gotten better looking with age. This morning he’s wearing a gorgeous brown sport coat, dark slacks, a deep red tie and deep red handkerchief. Dude!
There were orders with our distributor Publishers Group West for 4,193 copies of the book in the first 8 days of February and we are going back to press right now, just a month after the book hit the bookstores.
First printing was 15,000, this one will be 12,500.
Hey I thought print books were supposed to be dead!
Last night I took a 3-4 mile slow run, solo as usual, such a relief to not be training for races. The salamanders were out, crossing the path as they do, blithely and blindly.They are totally cute, with knobby eyes and splayed-out toes, and they walk like this:
-right front foot and left rear foot forward / 2-second pause / left front foot and right rear foot forward. The salamander slo-mo march. Counted a dozen of them.
There are small owls that hang out by the sides of the trail, hunting for mice. 5 of them, here and there. They’d let me get maybe 40-50′ away, then float off. Owls make no sound when flying. I’ve heard that their wing feathers have tapered edges so they’ll be silent in flight. Miceys, comin to gethcha.
As I got back down into the wetlands, I heard 3 coyotes, singing to each other from different spots. Each call had 3, 4, or 5 notes. Starting low and ending high. One guy had a really high note. They’d yodel a bit in between some notes. The full moon broke through the clouds. Who wouldn’t howl with joy?
Pack rats, or wood rats, are all over in this part of the world. In hard-to-reach parts of the woods, they build these 3-foot high pyramidal nests out of sticks and twigs. Some of these are beautifully constructed. Around the homestead, they make nests deep down in the woodpiles. Recently, they’ve been dragging split kindling up to the top of the wood pile, for what purpose I know not. Surprising that they can and would do this.
They’re quite different from scumbag Norwegian rats. They look more like an enlarged mouse, and have white fur on their bellies. I trap them when need be, but to some extent, live and let live.
When it came time to do our first e-book — Marathon: You Can Do It!, by Jeff Galloway — we couldn’t find anyone we thought would do a good enough job in converting print book to ebook. So Rick Gordon did the book “in-house,” as they say — for the iPad and the Kindle. It came out really well: typography, color, graphics, and perhaps most importantly, smooth flowing of the many training charts in the book. I compared it with all the other iPad e-books on running, and it looks way better.
We entered it in the non-fiction category of the Publishing Innovation Awards this year and although it didn’t win, it was awarded the QED (Quality-Excellence-Design) Seal. Here’s what the judges said about Rick’s work:
“Marathon: You Can Do It displays a creative design that does not distract from the text, making the pages visually appealing as well as informative. Tables contain a lot of structure, yet even rendered as art are easy to read. The ‘Tips on Using This Book’ for the iPad demonstrates a thoughtfulness and sensitivity to the reader’s experience of this digital title.”
I started this blog 7 years ago. A bit reluctantly at first. (Sort of the same way I began using a Macintosh.) As the years have gone by, it’s become part of my life; I’m committed to getting up at least one post a day, it gives me a quick and easy way to tell people what I discover in the world around me.
In a way it doubled my workload: I have my work as an author, photographer, and publisher — making books — and there’s the blogging. Along with the occasional Tweet, a full plate.
Then along came Facebook. I just didn’t have the time to get involved in this different form of communication, so Lew (Lewandowski) started doing a Shelter Facebook page. I didn’t really understand how Facebook worked until yesterday when Lew and I looked over his work. I was impressed. At left is a photo that caught my eye: the mobile farm stand of the organic Four Season Farm of Harborside, Maine. Lew scans the web for items of interest.
With the blog I’m basically broadcasting; I don’t have time to reply to many comments. With Lew’s Facebook page, there’s a flow. People don’t just comment, they send photos, videos, they share with friends; it’s a web of communication. So I’ll keep blogging, and Lew will keep Facebooking, and this should give you a pretty good picture of what goes on in our work and with our interests: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Shelter-Publications-Inc/91849471589?ref=ts
