the frig blig

Jimi Hendrix was born 65 years ago today, and shockingly, this fact does not appear on Wikipedia’s front-page ‘On This Day’ listing.

His music has and will continue to be discussed to death (NPI) but as I was in highschool when he died, allow me the following reminiscences:

1. I can’t do any better than to quote my friend Tim who upon first hearing Are You Experienced, recalled intense puzzlement, thinking “What the hell was that?”, followed by immediately replaying the album. The sound was that new.

2. I recently discovered quite by accident that prior to going to England he had a band for a few months in New York city, Jimmy James and The Blue Flames. I learned about this while researching Randy California, after listening to an old Spirit CD and wondering how he got that name. Turns out there were two Randys in the Jimmy James band and to distinguish between them Jimi called them Randy California and Randy Texas. The moniker stuck (and when Are You Experienced came out, 15-year-old RC was surprised to learn Jimi’s last name wasn’t James).

3. I gave away my copy of ‘Hendrix in the West’ to my highschool friend and Hendrix fan Tripp Anderson way back when; I hope you got lots of listens out of that disk Tripp! Regards whereever you are.

4. Who would have guessed that I’d end up living in Hendrix’s hometown umpteen years later?

After spending some quality time configuring my new freebsd file server I keep rediscovering this basic fact: linux commands don’t necessarily work on bsd. For instance take the simple `cp -a` — turns out there is no -a option in bsd’s cp command. So I stop, check the man page, and use -Rfp instead.

This is the n-teenth difference I’ve found so far, following disk slices, disklabel, and which device name to pass to the respective disk utilities.

Not that I’m complaining; I am pointing out an aspect of this learning curve: knowing linux prior to starting with bsd is a mixed blessing.

Eight-year-old P from Corvallis was painting watercolors and S asked her for some ‘refrigerator art’. Here’s P’s resulting masterpiece:

We had a great time playing host to our friends from Corvallis and Beaverton this weekend.

Loyal and attentive reader J. congratulated the blig on it’s one-year anniversary a few days ago (thanks for noticing!). Looking back to it’s beginning in November 2006, the fourth-ever posting was ambushed-by-chum. This morning we (S&F accompanied by friends J&P, R and C) returned to the scene of the chum where I’ll be danged if they weren’t back at it again, swimming upstream in the creek to lay and fertilize their little eggs. The fish were too quick for my trigger finger, so instead of a picture of spawn-frenzied salmon I offer you the above photo of frost-encrusted leaves near the banks of the creek.

Former middle-east correspondent and current NY Times ‘foreign affairs’ columnist Thomas Friedman joins forces with those arguing for a U.S. invasion of Iran in his latest column. This is somewhat surprising given his occasional liberal slant and years covering the Lebanese civil war. Could he be working for the Israeli lobby? Or is there another plausible explanation?

It’s that holiday in the U.S. where the white folks give thanks to native americans for giving their ancestors food and preventing the colonists from starving to death. I’m mainly thankful that I’m not a turkey this time of year. And I’m not sure what the native americans are thankful for; if I was a better bligger I’d conduct a poll and report the results, but it’s hard enough finding time to post regular entries, thank you very much.

Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S.

Who will the U.S. invade next? …I know, Iran!

1. create pencil drawing
2. scan
3. apply ‘charcoal’ effect
4. post

The virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu has been discovered in turkeys on a farm in Suffolk England. According to the BBC, “All birds at the affected premises - including approximately 5,000 turkeys, 1,000 ducks and 500 geese - will be slaughtered.”

Why stop at that? The entire farm should be totally burned down, at the very least. And noises annoying to birds should be broadcast all along the perimeter to prevent uninformed birds from flying into the contaminated airspace.