This spectacular creature showed up and posed for pictures. One of the earliest posts on this website featured another fantastic dragonfly.

I like to take and to publish these pictures for the sake of art, but this one has a little story behind it. These days, I am working hard on revising my bar exam essay writing video program. I really want to be finished. Today I worked all morning at my Ocean Beach office, and this afternoon my sister-in-law Eden, her husband Gil, and their young son Sam came for a delightful afternoon of socializing, swimming and eating. This beautiful dragonfly showed up a few minutes after Eden and her family had left. I was on my hands and knees on the floor of my home office, hooking up some equipment. Alexis and Elana called to me from the patio. How come nobody around here respects my work? Don’t I ever get to take care of my own business?

Fortunately for me, I have a wife and daughter who appreciate that you don’t get that many chances to snag a taste of natural beauty like this one. No doubt you’ll all be pleased to know that somehow I did manage to get my gadgets to cooperate, and that soon a needy public is going to get in on the latest secrets to writing passing essays on the bar exam (for a modest fee).

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30 years and three months later, I returned to the site of the World’s Tallest Barber Pole. It pleased me to see the school so obviously prospering. It was nice to take pictures on a day when Mt. St. Helens was not exploding, too. That was the key feature of my college graduation day – the mountain blew up and a massive ash-fall was occurring while I was collecting my diploma. My parents came up for the ceremony but hurried off without staying for dinner.

Come to think of it, I should have gone out for lobster, to make up for the fancy meal I missed back in 1980! Oh well, maybe in another 30 years.

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Here is the latest example of why it’s fun to have a camera handy when you’re outdoors. This bird -  a bushtit, according to George, was one of a big swarm of a couple dozen that zipped off to the next group of trees to the south a second or two after I took this picture. Wait! Maybe the title of this blog entry should have been, “One in the Bush,” or maybe “Bushtit in the Bush!” Oh well, maybe next time.

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Jacaranda trees are native to tropical and subtropical regions of South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribean.  They’re also popular all over southern California.  I love the redwoods and palm trees, but there’s something about the evanescence of the spectacular spring jacaranda blooms that never fails to make me happy. This magnificent tree is in Ocean Beach, just a few short blocks from the water. The detail shot below is from another tree about a mile inland from Torrey Pines Beach.

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We went to Balboa Park to celebrate Mother’s Day last weekend. A group of Native American tribes were holding an outdoor gathering that was open to the public. It was fun and educational. We learned that in the days before the white man invaded, tranquil and peaceful indigenous people would sit together around the campfire, living in harmony with the natural environment and with one another, enjoying bacon wrapped hot dogs! It’s a good thing a few intrepid and courageous people were able to keep that tradition alive long enough to see it embraced by the masses.

Native American bacon wrapped hot dogs have special medical qualities – that’s one reason why it’s OK to eat them. That’s also how they justifiy the $35 price. Alexis thinks they use kosher hot dogs to wrap the bacon around, because irony tastes better. Exactly. Like I said, we have to take a little personal responsibility for our own health. Everybody knows kosher hot dogs are better for you.

The colorfully-dressed, feather-crowned guy who sold me this outdoor feast told me all about the history and about the powerful medicine in these hot dogs. He looked at me earnestly, like a brother might, as I held the two $20 bills.

“Do you know these medical hot dogs will take away gray hair?”

“How, by making it fall out?”

“No, by invigorating your body and making you young again. You’ll see.”

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One of the most popular posts on these pages is a piece I wrote about being on-stage with Perfumes of Araby at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1972. That post has a nice photo of Diane that my dad took that year. Here is another photo I’ve found in the family archives. This is a picture of Diane I took at 1971 at the Faire in Agoura.

Every May I think back to the halcyon days of the Renaissance Faire, adrift on the mists of time. I expect to come up with super-8 movie film of one of Diane’s faire performances, captured on two cameras. I also expect to receive a unicorn for my next birthday.

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That’s more than enough consumerism for now. No doubt you are well-pleased to have spent precious moments of your life thinking about transistor radios over the decades. That’s not something everybody gets to do every day, is it?

Spring is bringing some lovely little flowers. Some, like the nice tomato flowers to the far left, are going to end up on the dinner table. Others, such as the other tiny and treacherous  flowers you see, are destined to be ‘eliminated.’

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I still remember holding the big, heavy black camera in my small hands and trying to keep it steady while at the same time pressing down the steel button hard enough to take the picture. My dad was sitting still on a reclining lawn chair on the concrete patio of our old-fashioned 1920′s garden court apartment complex, in part of town now known as West Hollywood.

At the moment I took this picture I was positive it would be a masterpiece. When the pictures were developed this was the one I was most interested in – after all, it would prove to the world what a hugely artistic and gifted little boy Gerry and Joan had on their hands.

Imagine my chagrin when I discovered I failed to, as we say in modern corporate lingo, “meet or exceed expectations.” To make matters even worse, I could tell that my dad was actively disappointed with my first effort at photography.

Today is the seventh anniversary of his death.

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This magnificent specimen is smaller across than the tip of an eraser at the end of a pencil. Too bad each of these tiny flowers can create thousands of deadly weeds, which threaten to choke the life out of ‘useful’ plants, such as this one, which I offer as proof of the majestic in common life:

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Which is the useful life?

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This creature is called Carausius Morosus, commonly known  as the Indian Walking Stick because it’s from India and it looks like a walking stick. I’ve reported on these guys once before. Here is a close-up look at one of its little eyes.

Apparently these insects are voracious eaters. They come to America as pets, selling for around $10. The females lay thousands of eggs, and the resulting spawn enjoy munching on the local California gardens as much as we do. No doubt having more competition for our calories will result in our becoming leaner and more efficient.

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OK, actually it’s a lizard, but “Lizard in the Grass” just isn’t as catchy. If I’m not mistaken, this is a fine representative of the Southern Alligator Lizard, elgaria multicarinata.

It’s great when a camera is handy at the right time!

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Friends of the family thought this was a cute name for an essentially nice cat. What they did not know is that the animal you see in this 1973 photograph actually is Ming the Merciless of the planet Mongo. Here’s the story – back in the early-to-mid 1960′s, my dad was a writer for Bill Burrud, well-known for his syndicated travel shows on TV. One of the old-time hands from Hollywood who worked on the team was a guy named Barney A. Sarecky, famous for saying “All houses are haunted. All persons are haunted. Throngs of spirits follow us everywhere. We are never alone.”

Barney Sarecky was the man responsible for producing the Flash Gordon movie serials starring Buster Crabbe back in the 1930′s. It turned out that “Charlie Middleton” was a real alien who had been stranded in America around 1910. He was a shape shifter on his home planet, and enjoyed considerable success in vaudeville and the first couple decades of talking pictures. Barney hired him because it seemed a natural fit and because he didn’t have to pay more than scale.  One night at a Hollywood party, for reasons that remain a mystery, Middleton changed into a cat and discovered that he was unable to change back into human form (his original life form did not breathe our air).

The cat lived with Barney until the old producer died. My dad agreed to take him in after that, and Ming the Merciless, Emperor of Mongo, otherwise known as Charlie Middleton, lived out the rest of his days on Rutherford Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

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