The San Diego Zoo is a spectacular place. This week Elana and I are attending watercolor art camp. We spend some time with the animals and then create paintings of them. Here is a great picture Lana took today of a hungry and angry tiger.

I figured it would be OK to help get a better photo by dangling her into the tiger enclosure, and I’m sure you agree that this would be a much less interesting picture if there were bars or reflections off the glass to get in the way of our view of this magnificent predator. Plus, it’s important for parents and kids to bond. Not only do we get  a great photo, but a young woman gets a chance to look death in the face without fear before her 12th birthday.

Here is my watercolor of the same animal.

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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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How nice. So why bother writing about it? Who cares? Well, maybe nobody cares, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to join the crowd of people who express public contempt for Microsoft Vista. I thought, fine, I’ll just upgrade to Windows 7. I got an upgrade disc at a faculty discount, but it wouldn’t work! I experimented with Ubuntu, which finally failed – and brought down Windows with it!

One day I hope to reject Windows in favor of an open-source operating system. For now, however, I must say Ubuntu has done me a huge favor! It forced me to reformat my hard drive and start over. This photo proves that an external web cam is up and running under Windows XP.

I love Fujitsu laptops! As for Microsoft operating systems…

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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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Arizona’s harsh new anti-immigrant law has received a lot of self-righteous comment from all sides. Although I deplore the racism at the heart of Arizona’s law, I believe the angry, confused white people of Arizona deserve the same compassion their undocumented brown counterparts are entitled to.

I’m writing this entry from a rich suburban neighborhood a couple dozen miles north of the US-Mexico border. There is economic and social chaos on both sides of this frontier. In my little way I would like to contribute to inter-racial, cross-border Solidarity. Illegal immigration is caused by “free trade” agreements like NAFTA and GATT, and by the drug war. It will be solved by limiting corporate power and by legalizing drugs.

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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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…Yeah we are. The first picture is from 2002 and the second is from a few days ago.

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Which is the useful life?

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