Midea Duo 12,000 BTU Portable Air Conditioner

At Amazon Midea Duo 12,000 BTU (10,000 BTU SACC) HE Inverter Ultra Quiet Portable Air Conditioner, Cools up to 450 Sq. Ft., Works with Alexa/Google Assistant, Includes Remote Control & Window Kit.

'Vacation'

I'm counting down the days to Easter Vacation, when, counting the weekends, I'll have 10 days off from classes. I'll do some grading, but otherwise I plan to get out and get some sun and exercise. 

Check out this oldie, from the Go-Gos: 

Raiders Welcome 3-0!

I was in Vegas two weekends back and checked out the Raiders vs. Steelers at a sports bar across the way from the Bellagio, where my wife and I were staying.

I'm fired up for the season, heh. (For the Rams too, who are looking like Super Bowl material, for sure.)

On Twitter:

¡Bienvenidos al 3-0! 🏖️ pic.twitter.com/X0HfKWtby6

— Las Vegas Raiders (@Raiders) September 27, 2021

Vegas Vactioners Face 26-Mile Traffic Jam Back to California (VIDEO)

At the Review Journal, "Memorial Day traffic jams I-15 at California-Nevada border."

There were a few drunk drivers, but most of those busted were trying to make time on the emergency lanes. That's why my wife and I get on the freeway before 6:00am, to beat the rush back to Cali.

Please Shop Amazon Until I Can Get Back to This Blog, Tomorrow, or the Next Day

I'm heading out to Fresno/Clovis in a bit, so here's the link to Amazon, if you'd like to do some shopping, which is appreciated. 

And for some reason, I woke up with Elvis Costello's "Alison" on my brain, and I was singing the song in my head while taking my morning piss, heh.

I'll be back up blogging again as soon as I can. Have a great Easter holiday!

Personal Selfie: Monterey Bay 2018

From my 2018 family vacation to Monterey Bay. I'm going through old photos and wanted to post it here just to have it on file lol.

Bad-ass Buffalo Chucks Tourist Kid Like 20 Feet Lol

Well, that's a vacation she'll never forget.

OH NO! A 9-year-old girl was thrown in the air by a bison when the animal charged a group of about 50 tourists at Yellowstone National Park.
STORY: https://t.co/Do3487Dn8O pic.twitter.com/bke0xt3FDV

— FOX 5 DC (@fox5dc) July 24, 2019

Americans Looking for a Summer Escape — From the News!

Well, summer's a good time to escape. I read the New York Times and followed politics on Twitter while on vacation, but that probably wasn't enough. Sometimes you have to shut all down for a few days, sheesh.

At Bloomberg, "Freaked Out Americans Desperately Seek to Escape the News":

“State of the nation” trumps money and work to be America’s primary source of stress.  https://t.co/J3yaqMLJUZ via @BloombergQuint

— Denzil Weitz (@Rhinosan1) June 30, 2018

(Bloomberg) -- Last week, Jen Wrenn, a children’s literacy advocate in San Diego, attended her first political protest after reading about the Trump administration policy of separating small children from their immigrant parents at the border.

She had heard ProPublica’s audio of a little girl crying in the border camp and decided to do something about it.  She shouted. She marched. And afterwards, she decompressed by watching the Mr. Rogers documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

“As soon as I hear the theme song, my blood pressure goes down,” Wrenn said. “I think that kind of calm is what we all crave mentally right now.”

The film about Fred Rogers, the beloved figure of American childhood, has made $4.9 million at the box office since it opened on June 8—more than 20 times the typical haul for a documentary. In interviews, director Morgan Neville paints the documentary’s success as indicative of our times. “We’re in this period in our culture where I feel like nobody wants to be an adult anymore,” Neville recently told Deadline. “A character like Fred takes us back to how we should treat each other.”

Last fall, the American Psychological Association found that almost two-thirds of Americans listed “the state of the nation” as their primary source of stress, above both money and work. More than half  believed that America was at its lowest point in history. Almost 70 percent of all Americans feel a sense of “news fatigue,” according to the Pew Research Center. The nation’s emotional exhaustion even makes an appearance in a recent Enterprise Rental Car survey: When the company surveyed more than 1,100 Americans about their summer travel plans, the top three reasons given for traveling were stress, the news and the political climate.

“Just this morning I had a guy come in who is so distracted by the news that he can’t get his work done,” said Jonathan Alpert, a New York psychologist. “The levels of anxiety and stress I’m seeing are profound.”

“It’s way more relaxing than reading about Melania’s terrible jacket choice.”

Those heightened stress levels are reflected in Americans’ chosen leisure activities...

RTWT.

Toni Garrn on the Beach

She's a beauty!

At London's Daily Mail, "Sending temperatures soaring! Toni Garrn goes completely TOPLESS as she catches rays during sun-soaked getaway to Hawaii."

And at Taxi Driver, "Toni Garrn Topless on the Beach."

Favorite beach on the island 🥥 #Kauai pic.twitter.com/W7GN3G62ua

— Toni Garrn (@ToniGarrn) January 5, 2018

T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas

The Dixie Chicks played there last night.

It's right behind the New York New York Hotel, where there's now a new dining and entertainment promenade between that hotel and the Monte Carlo. (We vacationed in Las Vegas this last week. You might have seen a couple of my tweets at @AmPowerBlog.)

It's very impressive.

See Wikipedia for details.

The Great American Road Trip

Summertime and the livin' is easy, heh.

At the New York Times, "America Is Hitting the Road Again":

ON ROUTE 66 IN NEW MEXICO — Bob Pack forgot to bring his James Taylor CDs. Still, he and his brother and sister were having a blast, rolling among the sandstone mesas, ghost towns and kitschy tourist attractions.

They reminisced about family trips as children back in the 1950s, Mr. Pack and his sister, Joann, said, and not even their brother’s “annoying” habits of chewing tobacco and telling dirty jokes could ruin the drive. “I wanted to see West Texas one more time,” he said over breakfast at the Route 66 Casino Hotel.

Over in Arizona, Kay McNellen, a 23-year-old actress from San Diego, said she took to the highway almost every weekend these days, just to see how far she could drive. She has motored across the Mojave Desert, admired Sequoia National Forest and Instagrammed the Grand Canyon. “This is a better view than Netflix will give you,” she said.

The great American road trip is back.

It’s partly that gasoline this driving season is cheaper than it has been in 11 years, according to the AAA motor club, and that the reviving economy is making people more willing to part with their money. But there is more than that at play here. This may be a cultural shift, as Americans experiment with the notion that maybe money can, in fact, buy happiness, at least in the form of adventures and memories.

It is a change that appears to have taken root in the years since the 2008 financial crisis. “Postrecession, people are focused on memories that cannot be taken away from them, as opposed to tangible goods that expire and wear out,” said Sarah Quinlan, a marketing executive at MasterCard Advisors. “There’s a sense that you can take away my job, you can take away my home, but you can’t take away my memory.”

Whatever their motivation, Americans last year drove a record 3.15 trillion miles, according to the Department of Transportation, beating the previous mark, set in 2007. So far this year, both travel and gasoline consumption are up again.

The desire to get behind the wheel still comes as something of a surprise. The conventional wisdom was that driving mileage had probably peaked in 2007. The demographic bulge represented by the baby boomers is aging out of the driving years; people typically drive less as they hit retirement.

At the same time, millennials were not sharing the passion for the open road that previous generations of young adults had. Many, in fact, preferred to live in the nation’s downtowns, eschewing personal cars in favor of shared Ubers, or walking to their work and play.

But it turns out that both generations are driving more than anyone expected. “A lot of millennial behavior was really deferred assimilation,” said Steven E. Polzin, a transportation researcher at the University of South Florida. In other words, just like Mom and Dad, they were destined for a more traditional lifestyle — the marriage, the home, the garage — they just took a little longer to get there.

One such millennial is Jenna Bivone, a 29-year-old website and app designer, who two years ago left downtown Atlanta to live on the outskirts of the city with her boyfriend. “We used to walk everywhere, but the rents were too high and we wanted some land for my dog,” she said. “In a more suburban area we found good schools, stuff like that for future plans.”

Now she has a daily commute of at least a half-hour each way, and on weekends she and her boyfriend drive around Georgia and neighboring states looking for the best hiking. Over the last three years they have taken road trips in Wyoming and Colorado to hike in the national parks.

“When we travel we want to go to places we might never see again,” she said. “We’re not going to be young forever.”

Michael McNulty, a 67-year-old biotech executive from San Francisco, might not agree with the last part of her statement. Last year he bought a used Ford Airstream B-190 motor home on Craigslist for $13,000 as an experiment. He and his wife are enjoying the road trips, he said, and they are gradually extending their radius.

“The kids’ colleges are paid for, and they are out of the house,” he said. “We have been all over the world, and now we are seeing the U.S.A.”

Mr. McNulty did all the driving to the Grand Canyon for an extended weekend in April, and he prepared to drive all the way back home, 14 hours, in one day. The reason was simple, he said. “We’re going to go for it on Tuesday,” he said, smiling, “because I have to get back to work on Wednesday.”

The phenomenon is being further amplified by, of all things, a desire in some families for cross-generational adventures that harks back to a halcyon age of bundling everyone into the station wagon, counting license tags from faraway states, and mediating back-seat fights over who started the fight. Baby boomers, it seems, want to bond with their grandchildren on the road. Rental-car companies are reporting increased demand for bigger vehicles to accommodate the generations...

Still more at that top link.

Asheville, N.C.: The New, Hip Destination in the South?

I had no idea about Asheville when I visited a couple of years back, but I liked it.

And now here's this at WSJ, "Asheville: The South’s Insider Destination":

HENRY JAMES WASN’T much taken with Asheville, the small mountain town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. The novelist spent a week there in 1905 as a guest at Biltmore, George Vanderbilt’s 250-room French Renaissance home. “It is a strange gorgeous colossus,” he wrote to Edith Wharton, “in a vast void of desolation.”

But Mr. James is one of the few who’ve had an unkind word to say about Asheville, one of America’s oldest holiday towns. It was a favorite of the Gilded Age glitterati, including Ms. Wharton, who arrived at Biltmore not long after Mr. James and dispatched a more enthusiastic letter (referencing a popular painting of the day) about the “divine landscape, ‘under a roof of blue Ionian weather.’ ”

Staring out the window of my friend Hap Endler’s snug Cessna on an impromptu aerial tour of Asheville and the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains, I found myself siding with Ms. Wharton. It was a pale blue September afternoon and we were flying over wave after wave of mountain tops covered in oak, maple and pine trees, a deep-green sea dappled in gold and red.

When we flew over Asheville, set squarely in the middle of the French Broad River Valley, I could see just a few tall buildings, most dating to the 1920s, sprout from the compact downtown. I could even make out the small, leafy squares where young buskers play their guitars and washboards on one corner, while a group of young homeless men panhandle for coffee on another. We were up too high to see the sign outside the Indian restaurant, Chai Pani, that reads “Namaste, Y’all,” but I knew that it was there: I’d seen it that morning on my way to the Early Girl Eatery, where a tattooed waiter in a cowboy shirt served me fried-green tomatoes over grits.

Hap and his wife, Julia Weatherford, live just outside of Asheville, in the town of Black Mountain. They’ve entertained me for years with stories about their colorful corner of Appalachia (where Julia, eager to dye her own yarn, bought a flock of sheep), but I had yet to see it for myself. Then, in September, Hap called to give me the latest. “Asheville is hopping. New breweries and restaurants are popping up like crazy and a bunch of hotels are under construction,” he said. Come on down. I’ll take you to President Obama’s favorite barbecue place.” How could I refuse?

Though the city and surrounding mountains have long been a top vacation destination for Southerners and have drawn luminaries from Albert Einstein to Willem de Kooning over the years, it’s only now starting to catch on with travelers outside of the South. A growing number of East and West Coasters are flying in to hike, fly fish and kayak and to lap up the beer (Asheville has 18 breweries and counting). They’re also coming for the restaurants, galleries and the music, all found in surprising abundance for a town smaller than Nantucket...

Hmm, maybe I'll plan a vacation out there with my wife. I stayed at the Grove Park Inn, which is quite famous, apparently.

Keep reading, in any case.

Hundreds of Thousands in Las Vegas for Labor Day Weekend (VIDEO)

Wow. America's playground?

Sure looks like a lot of fun. I wish I could've made it out there with my family this weekend, but then I've been chilling pretty nice.

Maybe later.

At ABC News 13 Las Vegas:

Joan Jett at Harrah's Resort Southern California

Last night my wife and I caught Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, with opening band Night Ranger, at Harrah's Resort Southern California.

I tweeted a shot of our concert tickets.

I don't see a concert review yet, but she's as hot as ever, tight band, lots of energy and looking fabulous.

She was in the news earlier this week for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where she sang "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for Nirvana's introduction. See Hollywood Reporter, "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Nirvana Joined by Joan Jett, Lorde; Dave Grohl and Courtney Love Hug It Out." Also at Rolling Stone, "Nirvana Reunite With Lorde, Joan Jett on Vocals for Rock Hall of Fame," and "The Inside Story of Nirvana's One-Night-Only Reunion."



PHOTO CREDIT: Harrah's Resort on Facebook.

#Vegas Beggar Dude Needs a Beer

My kinda panhandler, on the bridge between the MGM Grand and New York New York hotels, Las Vegas, Nevada.



I'm in Vegas for the holiday weekend with my wife and youngest boy. I've been posting photos and commentary to Twitter.

Sinkhole Swallows Florida Resort

Pretty wild.

At NYT, "Sinkhole Swallows Part of a Building at a Resort in Florida."

The Beach is Better in September

That's one thing I used to love about UCSB — classes didn't start until the end of September, which of course meant that school didn't cut into the prime beach time.

And right now, in June, it's more like this:

Spending the Night at Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula

My wife had a free night and we're all off this week for the holiday.

The rooms are luxurious:

Our room faces north, overlooking Temecula's south side:

Heading Back to the O.C.

We should be on the road by now. Regular blogging will probably pick back up tonight and tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

#TheEagles at @mgmgrand. Amazing concert. Love those guys. And glad my whole family made it to the show! #RockandRoll twitter.com/AmPowerBlog/st…
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) March 24, 2013

Winter Break

At Althouse, "How I spent the winter break between semesters at the University of Wisconsin Law School":

I sat in my Freedom Chair or stood at my motorized desk in front of a wall of picture windows looking out over our snow-covered yard though which a dog occasionally bounded, and — once the blizzard came — went cross-country skiing nearly every day. I ate many delicious meals at home with my beloved husband, and watched some football games on TV. I blogged, read, graded some exams, worked on new syllabi, reorganized a couple closets, and — at long last — burned the rest of the CDs I still cared about into my iTunes.

Keep reading.

I my world, winter break doesn't start until the papers are graded and semester grades submitted. Then I can forget about it --- and this year I have until February 5th to chill, with the college's new 16 week calendar giving faculty members a really long and wonderful holiday.

PHOTO: "At the Winter Walk Café..." (on Flickr).