Explore the Iconic Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas: A Must-See Roadside Attraction About eight miles west of Amarillo, clearly visible from I-40, is a sculpture composed of ten old Cadillacs half buried in the middle of a plowed field. This is art in the loosest possible sense of the word. Uncontrolled graffiti is more like it. I’m a bit too old fashioned for The Cadillac Ranch, I prefer my art to look much as it looked when the artist created it. I have never been a big fan of graffiti-well, except for Banksy. I remember visiting the Bridges of Madison…
Category: random thoughts
Halloween Horror Nights
The Wife has always been a big fan of Haunted Houses. One of our first dates was to a grade school haunted house with peeled grape eyeballs and macaroni brains. It was still fun, even though it was not the scariest haunted house. But then, we weren’t kids either. On our first trip to Disneyland, during an October, their Haunted Mansion was closed for maintenance. How can you close a haunted house in October? The next time we went it was open, but it had been given a Nightmare Before Christmas makeover and was not exactly the same as I…
Mosque Near World Trade Center
President Obama follows in the footsteps of John Kerry by doing a bit of waffling. He’s not sure whether or not there should be a new Mosque built two block away from Ground Zero in New York. First he seems to think it’s a fine idea, then he says that he would not comment on the issue. A number of people have noted that two Strip Clubs and an Off Track Betting place are already within two blocks of the World Trade Center, so what’s the big deal? Well, for one thing I don’t recall gangs of Strippers with box openers…
Breakfast at Burger King
I had one of those Undercover Boss moments at the Burger King in Lindale, Texas. Lindale is right off of I-20 about five miles north of Tyler. The Burger King I went to is just north of the freeway. Undercover Boss is a reality show where the owners of businesses drop by and watch their employees without their knowledge. It’s a great show. Working fast food is right at the bottom of the food chain. These are jobs even Mike Rowe won’t take on. The job sucks and the people who run these places don’t seem to care that the…
The Church of Art and Apathy
Sounds like my kind of place- Join our Church of Art and Apathy when you get good and ready, or get around-to-it. This is the official church for those that don’t wish to identify with a specific religion. For those that feel that atheism and agnosticism are just too much damm work. Others who believe that their religion solves all their problems, need not apply. We are a relatively New Religion with new attitudes. We are Apathists. We seek no converts. We distribute no pamphlets. We ring no door bells. The Church of Art and Apathy was thought about by…
The Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock
My overall feeling of the Buddy Holly Center was one of being creeped out. It’s a small museum filled mostly with relics of Buddy Holly’s childhood. There are baby pictures, school pictures, yearbooks, and postcards. A number of crude school art projects, such as the hand tooled leather guitar strap with a large BH carved on the back, filled another case. Then there is Buddy Holly’s childhood bedroom, just as he had left it. It was a snapshot of the 1950s and it was a little creepy. Among the cool items were mint condition copies of Buddy Holly’s early LPs…
Conan Painting Goes For $1.5 Million
Article first published as Conan the Destroyer Painting Goes for $1.5 Million on Technorati. The 1971 painting by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta sold just two months after the Pennsylvania artist’s death. Frank Frazetta was a favorite artist of my youth for his fantastical depictions of mostly nude women, such as Vampirella and his mostly nude men such as Conan. There were a number of paintings of nudes. As time went by I came to appreciated more than the artful rendering of the human form and found that I liked his animals and skies and weapons as well. He was also…
The Inner Game of Blogging
Timothy Gallwey’s brilliance was discovering that the subconscious has a lot more to do with success in sports than most people thought. What we think, and when we think too much, can cause our performance to decline. The same holds true with blogging, we can spend so much time looking for something to blog about that we never actually get around to writing anything. Just start typing. I used to take blogging pretty seriously-I was pretty active on Blogcatalog, Technorati, and Digg. Not so much now. But recently I got a couple of emails asking me to check out their…
Glasses
I’ve gone almost fifty years without glasses. I once had an employee at the DMV ask me if I were wearing contact lenses because she didn’t believe my eyesight was that good. But now time has caught up to me and my eyesight has started to bail on me. I choose a boring set of black frames that were on sale. The regular sight part of the glasses is pretty light, but just enough magnification to shift the world an small uncomfortable amount. The reading part of the bifocals is about what I have been using in the reading glasses…
I’m More of a Pagan Myself
At least, I used to say that until Pagans got all uppity and serious and wanted to be counted as a ‘real’ religion. I do a lot of work in churches of one sort or another. These are, by and large, Christian outfits-and there is a baffling array of people practicing an amazing array of faiths which have something to do with a fellow called Jesus-or maybe Joshua-who was around somewhere a couple of thousand years ago. This fellow was the King of the Jews-but his current day followers are not at all fond of the idea that he was…