Pilot's Log

Repeating my previous Donna Summer video embeds:

( From Here To Outer Space )

( Probably Her Most Epic Hit )

( The Flipside, including 'Heaven Knows', which was a hit in its own right )

( Feel The Heat )

Taking a Tylenol and washing it down with herbal tea at the moment. Hope this helps.

I really could have stayed another week in Florida, but I got enough of the things on my list done and all the people who matter most to me. Darn it, if America had actual passenger trains running I'd shuttle between here and there all the time.

* "And I'm Never Going Back To My Old School..." As said earlier, on St. Patrick's Day a high school classmate had invited me and my brother to a party at an Irish/Sports bar. Going was a necessary mistake. The music was way too loud to carry on conversations. We found our "party" but beyond two or three people we didn't "mingle" and while I thought I recognized one woman--I didn't want to talk to her. The truth came to me that if I really wanted to socialize with my classmates in school, I would have. These days there is no meaning attaching me to this crowd. All of a sudden I feel okay with having been shunned and flunked. I just didn't fit in.

* Too many of the people I know are now attached to oxygen apparati. If you smoke, quit. If you don't smoke, don't start.

* I will never again go in a Disney store. Mike dragged me in one so he could look at Princess figures. They'd never hire me, but I bet working there would drive a lot of people insane.

* I will probably swear off eating more than one meal a day at a restaurant. Not so much the expense, or necessarily the food...just the stress is enough.

* Q-105 is back. The Tampa station is now Sixties/Seventies/Eighties oldies rather than baseline Top 40, but they haven't lost the style that made us fans for so long.

* I decided to not be the Lipinski Proxy this time. Dana's fantasy baseball league is down to five participants so their draft today will probably run a lot quicker even without my assistance.

* Atlanta's highways are bedlam. Both ways we had trouble with crowds and volume slowdowns. Dunno what route I'll take next time tho'.

--Friday's on the phone to me!

My friend Paul gave me the MP3 files to the remastered Beatles catalog this week, all 16 albums and collections. So I've been playing some of the songs every so often and will probably do so all season till I get to all of them.

I suppose I have a rather skewed view of the band compared to most people. You see, I was a baby in their heyday (I was born around the time Revolver came out) but they had already broken up by the time I was allowed to listen to the radio in the early Seventies. So I knew all four of them as solo artists FIRST. It wasn't till much later in life that I got the message that these guys were THESE GUYS and so on.

The media establishment was so quick to move on that their songs as a group were largely out of circulation for some years. Besides, Paul kept on making hit records with Wings. There was no point to look back at that time...unless you were looking back to the Fifties in the wake of American Grafitti and Happy Days. It took the Disco backlash, Elvis' death, the Beatlemania Broadway show (anybody remember that?) and the Sgt. Pepper's movie/soundtrack to start a Beatles nostalgia trend in earnest.

Anyway, I come from a time warp with regards to that realm of pop culture. I'm like a baseball fan who has to remember that the Dodgers once played in Brooklyn, or a car nut who must be prompted that GM used to have a brand of cars called LaSalle. Well, I'm not THAT bad. After all, I can ask my brother (who played a role in his High School's Beatles-based revue).

FP

And I owe her one as well...she got an oil change today.

( From Here To Outer Space )