Monday, July 28, 2008


Welcome to beautiful downtown Beijing...(cough cough sputter sputter)

If the Olympics are going to be played in conditions which resemble
the photo on the right, it is going to be a mess. I wouldn't be surprised
if some athletes dropped out or got ill under such conditions especially
those in track and field events.



Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Muppets and Beethoven

Saw "The Dark Knight" today and found it be the best Batman movie to date. It was thoroughly entertaining and seeing the IMAX version added to the excitement. I loved the entire cast. For some reason I had never thought of Batman as being evil but there seemed to be a touch of that in him this time around. The Joker (Heath Ledger) was terrific and very evil. There is one thing that bothered me however and this makes me wonder if I am clairvoyant or what. In the beginning of the movie there is an extended bank robbery scene and I saw that somewhere, sometime. The whole sequence of events inside the bank including having a bank manager pull out an assault rifle to shoot some of the robbers, the grenade inside the manager's mouth and the school bus crashing through the front wall of the bank to take the robbers and the cash away, was something I have seen previously. Were these scenes taken from another movie? They must have been otherwise how do I explain having seen such details priior to this movie being released? There were so many details and it was such a long sequence that I really doubt it but how else to explain this.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

With news stories like this and on the increase, how can one NOT say we are headed for a depression? At least now we have the FDIC for regular accounts to bail out small account holders, otherwise we are headed in the same direction as we did 80 years ago.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Funny commercial from Thailand:



OMG, I feel awful...I forgot to make the falafel.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Recession? What recession? I went downtown today to the Westfield Shopping Center and other stores and I have not seen that many people there since Christmas. The only things missing were Christmas decorations and the Salvation Army people and their kettles.

I will never understand what tourists and others see in some guy banging on plastic and metal buckets on the sidewalk and making all sorts of noise but they sure gather round. Such noise...such foolishness! Don't they have anything better to do?

The weather today was again only partly (very partly) sunny with a good dose of wind. I wonder when the weather will improve here in SF?

My friend feels a bit stronger following his colon cancer surgery but is now having problems breathing so is on oxygen. It has been one thing after another for a number of months now. This is not good. He is scheduled to be discharged from the hospital on Monday but now I am not sure what will happen.

BTW, last Tuesday's post was not the last but this is a roller coaster ride in which I am not sure what will happen next.


Tuesday, July 15, 2008

This will be my last post on this page for awhile as I am sure no one wants to hear bad news, bad personal news about someone they do not know. Suffice it to say, my friend's surgery for colon cancer went well and they removed that part of the colon which was infected and blocked. The good news ended there however and now we are trying to figure out what to do next. It really boils down to quality of life issues for the remaining time and there are a lot of unanswered questions at the moment.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Here I am in my friend's house in Vallejo, California. Shortly I will be going to the hospital to visit with my friend before he goes into surgery for colon cancer.

Last night was rather creepy for me as it was the first time I had spent a night alone in this house and all sorts of natural noises had me freaked out at times so I had to get up to see if I could find the source. I never did so I eventually got to sleep. Then I woke up early this morning (5:30) and went over Scotty's, a convenient breakfast and lunch place near the house. Now I am just watching the clock as I write this. I plan to be at the hospital around 9:30 AM. Surgery is scheduled for 11:30 but they will probably move him into the OR area around 10:30 AM. Then it will be another hour or two for the actual procedure so this will be a boring day of waiting and just hoping the everything goes well and that there are no surprises along the way.

Monday, July 07, 2008

These are difficult days for me as my best friend is seriously ill. We think we know what is going on but are awaiting some official word from various doctors following a CAT Scan which was not good. He will see a specialist today and have another biopsy on Wednesday so right now all we can do is hope for the best. When someone leads a healthy lifestyle these things are very puzzling. If he smoked and drank it might be a little more understandable but there is nothing in his background to suggest environmental causes. I guess, as they say, it must be in the genes. This is so sad.