Nix!

Stevie Nicks, the lead singer with Fleetwood Mac is a technophobe, who doesn't own a computer or a cell phone.

"I believe that computers have taken over the world. I believe that they have in many ways ruined our children. I believe that kids used to love to go out and play. I believe that social graces are gone because manners are gone because all people do is sit around and text. I think it's obnoxious."

Q: If you and I were having lunch, and I pulled out my cell phone ...

A: I'm gonna put my hand on your hand and say, "Turn it off, for now. Just give me an hour, of you, I really want an hour of just you, and your heart. I don't want you talking to someone else while we're having lunch." It's love, you know, it's relationships. I don't want love and relationships to be lost, and I feel like that's happening.

POETICS

In the tiny Berkeley apartment where Jim Powell has lived since 1992, there's a California license plate on the wall that says "POETICS." Powell didn't buy it, but found it years ago while clearing litter alongside Interstate 880 in Oakland.

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"You know on the roadside you'll see a sign that says, 'This section of freeway cleaned by 'so-and-so'? So a group of Deadheads I knew decided to clean the mile beside the Coliseum. Caltrans gives you an orange Day-Glo vest and gloves. You go down there beside the freeway and everything is covered with 14 layers of diesel soot.

"Someone found that license plate in the ivy in one of the cloverleafs and said, 'This belongs to you.' Whoever owned that plate had their car stolen. And the people who stole it ditched the plate into the ivy. So that's my 'poetic license' and it's a stolen poetic license, which is appropriate," Powell says with a grin. "Your poetic license should come to you that way."

MORE...

Socialism in America

A Russian immigrant's view.

Philip Townsend

Philip Townsend is a British photographer who photographed many British rock groups during the 1960s and 70s. He was the first to photograph the Rolling Stones at the request of their then manager Andrew Loog Oldham. These revealing shots from 1963 are on display at the Morrison Hotel Gallery website. (They are copyrighted preventing me from showing them here.)

Meanwhile, here's a photograph of the early Rolling Stones from another source. It is rare in that it shows them smiling. It must have been taken before their manager at the time Andrew Loog Oldham decided that the group members should not be photographed smiling, presumably to distinguish them from that other rock and roll band of nice non-threatening boys. (The Stones projected a bad boy image.) Subsequently, the Stones would not be photographed smiling until most recent times.

Tiger Nervous

"The day I'm not nervous is the day I quit."
-- Tiger Woods

"All I wanted..."

Read the article written by Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III describing his experiences. Link

Chesley "Sully" Sullenburger

Interesting statements made on television by Chesley Sullenburger the pilot of the Airbus A320 airplane who emergency landed on Hudson River in New York on January 15.

He didn't pray.

"I imagine somebody in back was taking care of that for me," he said, referring to the panicked passengers and flight attendants in the plane's cabin. "My focus was so intensely on the landing, I thought of nothing else."

"The physiological reaction I had was strong and I had to force myself to use my training and force calm on the situation,"

"It was the worst, sickening, pit-of-your-stomach, falling-through-the-floor feeling I've ever felt in my life. I knew immediately it was very bad."

Afterwards.

"The first few nights were the worst. The second-guessing would come: It made sleep hard."

"One of the hardest things for me to do in this whole experience was to forgive myself for not having done something else, something better, something more complete,"

About being called a hero.

"I don't feel comfortable embracing it, but I don't want to deny it. I don't want to diminish their thankful feeling toward me. Something about this episode captured people's imagination. I think they want good news; they want to be hopeful again, and if I can help in that way, I will."