Author: DOuG pRATt

A ‘Cul de Sac’ in Hill Valley

Maybe you’ve heard that Marty McFly is auctioning replicas of his famous back-to-the-futuristic Nike sneakers, to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

Another fundraiser for the MJ Fox Foundation is Team Cul De Sac, named after the delightfully fanciful comic strip by Richard Thompson, who has Parkinson’s. A book is in the works, full of contributions from many different artists, including a painting by Bill Watterson, of the Cul de Sac character Petey.

When the book is published, the original art will be auctioned. Here’s a video preview.

Five years

I haven’t written anything for a week, which is a rather sorry lead-in to today, being five years since I started this weblog. Five years was the time between the Beatles coming to America and the Let It Be rooftop concert. This past week I’ve been reading and running and thinking and ripping CD’s in WMA lossless format, to be played on the super-sounding Logitech Touch. This screenshot is from the free Windows application that works with the free Logitech music server software.

Here’s a photo Rolling Stone magazine posted that really knocks me out, man.

There’s George Harrison, in his Beatle suit, September 1963 (possibly early October), at the height of Beatlemania in England, but he was in New York, unknown and anonymous! I wonder if anybody who saw George that day at the Empire State Building recognized him 4-5 months later when the Beatles arrived in New York?

Irene and the blustery day

I’m self-deploying myself as an emergency response team, and I just completed a check of the perimeter. A lot of leaves and small branches are down, but knowing that Hurricane Irene hasn’t reached NYC yet, and watching the trees blowing here, hundreds of miles north, I can see the possibility of catastrophe in the making. I’ll consider us lucky if we only lose power and Internet access.

Update: It’s almost 3 in the afternoon and I think we may be through the worst of it. The rain has let up and the wind is dying down. There are lots of branches in the yard and I went outside to collect the biggest of them.