Only in the Bay Area?

I just took an Uber ride to downtown and as with most of their drivers they are a good conversationalists.

My driver had moved from the Bay Area about a year and a half ago.

I said “I don’t see how you guys can afford to live there”.

He said that he couldn’t. He was making $130,000 a year and eligible for food stamps and section 8 housing.

I guess Manhattan is similar.

Other cities?

Pretty Much True

About all I have in common with the World War II ace Bud Anderson is that we live in the same vicinity.

The foothills around Sacramento are rife with recent history.

Take a 45 minute drive out to my favorite shooting range and you will see hills left by hydraulic mining, used during the gold rush.

There are dozens of former gold rush towns along California’s Highway 49.

Some of them are near dormant while others are bedroom communities to Sacramento.

A bedroom community of Placerville, just 30 miles or so up the hill from Sacramento, used to be known as Hangtown.

Anyway, Bud Anderson grew up in Newcastle California.

It’s just not funny

This morning, I am engaged in my regular routine and head over to Chicago Boyz. David Foster has a thought-provoking post on humor and sanity.

Comes now Claire Lehmann, tweeting:  “In clinical psychology you learn that the loss of a sense of humour can indicate deterioration in mental health.”  I’d assert that this is probably also true of entire organizations and entire societies.

An April 1st to Remember

I don’t know how the tradition of April Fools Day got started, but despite fair warning over much of my life, and a healthy dose of naivety thrown in, I have usually fallen for it.

Although April Fools’ Day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery.

Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563.

People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes.

Lost and Found

On occasion, I have a week’s free time or so, and have always used it for a road trip. I’ve used it for a Lexican get-together in Sandy Eggo, trips to the Southwest, Idaho, Oregon…

I wanted to see Crater Lake, OR back in 2017 and as it was, fellow Lexican ColoComment was going to be there at that time, too.

So we decided to see it together.

Name Tags

By lex, on July 7th, 2010

Pinch * put me in mind of a story.

Was a time in the Old Navy where it was fashionable at certain points to wear hemi- semi- demi- quasi-humorous name patches on the flight suits of America’s Finest. There were any number of “Roger Ball” name tags at the O’Club on a Friday night. When things got late, there were even raunchier monikers attached by Velcro: “Hugh Jardon” was but the least offensive. There might even have been a “Heywood Jablome.”

I can’t say.

Molly suddenly realized she had a problem

When she started using this…

H/T to a fellow Lexican for finding this…