AMAZING VICTORY SONG

I sure hope this Vietnam Veteran is elected again to the senate

SURRENDER?

This song meant so much to me in 1976 after moving to S.F. and means even more now, especially one line!  *

I'm going to rent myself a house
In the shade of the freeway
I'm going to pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I'll go on home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I'll get up and do it again
Amen
Say it again
Amen

I want to know what became of the changes
We waited for love to bring
Were they only the fitful dreams
Of some greater awakening
Ive been aware of the time going by
They say in the end its the wink of an eye
And when the morning light comes streaming in
You'll get up and do it again
Amen

Caught between the longing for love
And the struggle for the legal tender
Where the sirens sing and the church bells ring
And the junk man pounds his fender
Where the veterans dream of the fight
Fast asleep at the traffic light
And the children solemnly wait
For the ice cream vendor
Out into the cool of the evening
Strolls the pretender
He knows that all his hopes and dreams
Begin and end there

Ah the laughter of the lovers
As they run through the night
Leaving nothing for the others
But to choose off and fight
And tear at the world with all their might
While the ships bearing their dreams
Sail out of sight

I'm going to find myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means
And well fill in the missing colors
In each others paint-by-number dreams
And then well put out dark glasses on
And well make love until our strength is gone
And when the morning light comes streaming in
Well get up and do it again
Get it up again

I'm going to be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spender
And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Thought true love could have been a contender
Are you there?
Say a prayer for the pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender

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IT'S BLACK HISTORY MONTH

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Buffalo Soldiers of Company D, 8th Illinois Volunteer Regiment, 1899.
Images collected by W.E.B. Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway for the "American Negro Exhibit" at the Paris Exposition of 1900 (Exposition universelle internationale de 1900).
At the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois compiled a series of photographs for the "American Negro" exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. He organized the 363 images into albums, entitled Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.
Du Bois's work for the American Negro exhibit was extensive and much praised. In the Spring of 1900, Paris Exposition judges awarded him a gold medal for his role as "collaborator" and "compiler" of materials for the exhibit. 

YOSEMITE "LAVA FLOW"

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All factors aligned last week to create a phenomenon where refracted sunlight in frozen ice falls at Yosemite Valley made it appear that “lava” was pouring over the brink of the canyon. The effect only lasts for a minute or two.

BRAVE DOG

A South San Francisco Bay dog must have had a heart of steel Tuesday when he chased a 110-pound mountain lion into a tree in his owner’s Los Altos Hills backyard. Either that, or he had no clue what he was doing. Cody, an 85-pound German shepherd, spotted the male mountain lion around 7:30 a.m. near La Barranca and Elena roads and chased him into a tree, said Janice Mackey, spokeswoman with the California Department of Fish and Game. A state biologist arrived a short time later and monitored the big cat until it slunk down the tree and into the nearby open space. The mountain lion was never a threat, Mackey said. “The dog didn’t know what he was chasing,” Mackey said. “He probably thought it was another dog until it climbed the tree.” Despite their fierce reputation, mountain lions are “scaredy-cats,” Mackey said. “They’re solitary, they prefer to be on their own. “He was probably cruising around looking for breakfast and maybe he chased a rabbit into the yard,” she added. NBC Bay Area captured exclusive video of the cat in the tree.

STELLAR-MASS BLACK HOLE

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This artist's impression shows a binary system containing a stellar-mass black hole called IGR J17091-3624, or IGR J17091 for short. The strong gravity of the black hole, on the left, is pulling gas away from a companion star on the right. This gas forms a disk of hot gas around the black hole, and the wind is driven off this disk. New observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory clocked the fastest wind ever seen blowing off a disk around this stellar-mass black hole. Stellar-mass black holes are born when extremely massive stars collapse and typically weigh between five and 10 times the mass of the Sun. The record-breaking wind is moving about twenty million miles per hour, or about three percent the speed of light. This is nearly ten times faster than had ever been seen from a stellar-mass black hole, and matches some of the fastest winds generated by supermassive black holes, objects millions or billions of times more massive. Another unanticipated finding is that the wind, which comes from a disk of gas surrounding the black hole, may be carrying away much more material than the black hole is capturing. The high speed for the wind was estimated from a spectrum made by Chandra in 2011. A spectrum shows how intense the X-rays are at different energies. Ions emit and absorb distinct features in spectra, which allow scientists to monitor them and their behavior. A Chandra spectrum of iron ions made two months earlier showed no evidence of the high-speed wind, meaning the wind likely turns on and off over time. Image Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

WORK'IN ON MY TAXES

“1..2…3…4…1…2…4!” With that beginning countdown and George Harrison asserting himself as a major songwriter in the Beatles, Revolver begins and becomes one of the most critically acclaimed album ever made. And George wasn’t happy either about the tax situation he was in!

GET OUT YOUR KLEENIX

Over the last few months, we have seen a spat of wonderful videos of members of the LGBT community getting married. Australia and Italy especially had very powerful videos. This wonderful video has a spectacularly moving new angle. Every family should be so lucky to share a moment like this one. Enjoy!

OUR HEARTS ARE WITH TONY

San Francisco celebrated the 50th anniversary of Tony Bennet's famous song on Valentines Day, 2012.
The song was penned by George Cory and Douglass Cross, who were a gay couple that were homesick after moving to New York City. They tried several titles, and the one they thought of as "too corny" was the one we know. It was composed in 1954 but not released until 1962, when it spent a significant amount of time at the top of the music charts.

ANTIQUE "SUPER COMPUTER"

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Left: Glen Beck * Right: Frances Elizabeth Snyder Holberton attending the ENIAC - (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) the first general-purpose electronic computer formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and announced to the public the evening of February 14, 1946.

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) is a high-speed electronic computing machine which operates on discrete variables. It is capable of performing the arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square rooting on numbers (with sign indication) expressed in decimal form. The ENIAC, furthermore, remembers numbers which it reads from punched cards, or which are stored on the switches of its so called function tables, or which are formed in the process of computation, and makes them available as needed. The ENIAC records its results on punched cards from which tables can be automatically printed. Finally, the ENIAC is automatically sequenced, i.e., once set-up to follow a routine consisting of operations in its repertoire, it carries out the routine without further human intervention. When instructed in an appropriate routine consisting of arithmetic operations, looking up numbers stored in function tables, etc., the ENIAC can carry out complex mathematical operations such as interpolation and numerical integration and differentiation.

The speed of the ENIAC is at least 500 times as great as that of any other existing computing machine. The fundamental signals used in the ENIAC are emitted by its oscillator at the rate of 100,000 per second. The interval between successive signals, 10 micro-seconds, is designated by the term pulse time. The time unit in which the operation time for various parts of the ENIAC is reckoned is the addition time. An addition time is 20 pulse times or 200 micro-seconds (1/5000 th of a second). An addition time is so named because it is the time required to complete an addition. .Other operations require an integral number of addition times
*Of course this is not the notorious Beck that terrorizes the airwaves today. He has no grasp of even basic arithmetic!

SO KOOL.

FIFTY SEVEN YEAR OLD GREETING

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...Dorothy Collins, Snookie Lanson, Russell Arms, and Giselle McKenzie.  The "Your Hit Parade" singers, 1955.

My first job was delivering this "NEW" magazine door to door. My commission was 5c each but the local newspaper put me out of business by publishing it's own guide with their Sunday edition.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY

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Азис Поздрав за Свети Валентин 2012

"BEING FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR KITE

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February 14, 1843 - The Beatles' song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" was inspired by this nineteenth century circus poster for Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal. Pablo Fanque, the Victorian circus owner, who employed William Kite from 1843 to 1845.

185A.D. GUEST STAR

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This image combines data from four space telescopes to create a multi-wavelength view of all that remains of RCW 86, the oldest documented example of a supernova. Chinese astronomers witnessed the event in 185 A.D., documenting a mysterious "guest star" that remained in the sky for eight months. X-ray images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton Observatory were combined to form the blue and green colors in the image. The X-rays show the interstellar gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by the passage of the shock wave from the supernova. Infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE, Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, shown in yellow and red, reveal dust radiating at a temperature of several hundred degrees below zero, warm by comparison to normal dust in our Milky Way galaxy. By studying the X-ray and infrared data, astronomers were able to determine that the cause of the explosion was a Type Ia supernova, in which an otherwise-stable white dwarf, or dead star, was pushed beyond the brink of stability when a companion star dumped material onto it. Furthermore, scientists used the data to solve another mystery surrounding the remnant -- how it got to be so large in such a short amount of time. By blowing away wind prior to exploding, the white dwarf was able to clear out a huge "cavity," a region of very low-density surrounding the system. The explosion into this cavity was able to expand much faster than it otherwise would have. This is the first time that this type of cavity has been seen around a white dwarf system prior to explosion. Scientists say the results may have significant implications for theories of white-dwarf binary systems and Type Ia supernovae. RCW 86 is approximately 8,000 light-years away. At about 85 light-years in diameter, it occupies a region of the sky in the southern constellation of Circinus that is slightly larger than the full moon. This image was compiled in October 2011. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO & ESA; Infared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/B. Williams (NCSU)

FLAREWORKS ON THE SUN

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On Jan. 27, 2012, a large X-class flare erupted from an active region near the solar west limb. X-class flares are the most powerful of all solar events. Seen here is an image of the flare captured by the X-ray telescope on Hinode. This image shows an emission from plasma heated to greater than eight million degrees during the energy release process of the flare. Image Credit: JAXA/Hinode

THEY ALWAYS HAD THAT VIEW ?

A Mormon family with two wives and nine children, about 1889

The LDS Church has responded to the Prop 8 ruling:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regrets today’s decision. California voters have twice determined in a general election that marriage should be recognized as only between a man and a woman. We have always had that view.[emphasis mine]

Ahem.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, one of the court's most liberal judges, wrote in the 2-1 opinion.The Proposition 8 measure "serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples,"

SAN FRANCISCO PORN