You must go see for yourself. You’ll probably even know a few of these guys:

http://www.luriddigs.com

I know, I know. Everyone’s excited about what’s going on politically and everyone wants to send me a group email, a forward of a forward of a forward of something Arianna Huffington or Michael Moore wrote (which I probably already read several times) and that has a thousand indents and weird line breaks because of all the forwarding that makes it essentially unreadable.

I’ll hold up my end of the bargain and exercise my power to delete whatever you send if I’ve already seen it. No harm done. I can lift my right pinkie to the delete key as easily as a dog can lift its leg on a fire hydrant.

But YOU must hold up your end of the bargain as a responsible Internet citizen and BCC all your group emails. That is so that you don’t send everyone’s email visible to everyone. The reason being that when you don’t BCC, someone can hit “reply to all” (or a robot can do that) and then everyone’s email has been captured for later use. It’s a great way to get on your friends’ nerves. I don’t need to know that someone in Indiana is away for the week and has their computer replying automatically to all. This can and has created an endless loop of email that has filled my email box with hundreds of emails. I want that about as much as I want Sarah Palin to run for President in 2012. Respect your friends and BCC your groups! (If you’re sending a group email to your family or your small handful of friends who all know each other, no worries.)

NEVER REPLY TO ALL! If someone commits the cardinal sin of sending a group email visible, don’t reply to everyone.

I know, you may have grown up in a time when you had to call the switchboard to get Ernestine to connect you to Echo Valley 2-6809, but now you have a computer and you need to learn how to use it. If you got a food processor, you wouldn’t brag about the good old days when you had to chop a mountain of onions by hand while you simultaneously stick your hand in the machine and hack off your fingers, would you? No. In spite of being a survivor from a gentler generation decaying in the 21st century while nimrod know-it-alls handily use nouns like “text” as verbs, you’d learn to use the tool in front of you lest you lose your fingers. And you’d even learn to text someone wouldn’t you? (But don’t text me, I’m warning you, I have Verizon and it costs me 20cents for each text. Yep, 20 cents for a Generation “O” to write me and say, “Sup?” Twenty red pennies for you to send me a Shakespeare sonnet. So don’t. Send me an email or ring my damn phone and forget the text unless you’re someplace you absolutely can’t talk and absolutely have to get an important message to me, and really, if you’re THAT important, you’re probably no friend of mine.)

And while I’m at it, please don’t send attachments to me by email if they’re more than a couple megabytes. I need to keep my servers and email limits clean and ready for business. If you send a huge attachment of a video that someone forwarded you of some elephant sitting on someone at a zoo in India, all my email gets hung up behind it while it downloads. Most videos you send are ALREADY archived on YouTube. You could check for it first and then send the LINK to the YouTube page and save everyone the download time! Amazing.

And one more thing - I’m just not really into chain emails where you have to send something to 10 friends and wait for the magic to happen. I don’t need any more magic in my life, thank you very much. The daily unicorn rides to Candyland are enough.

Don’t let this shut you down. I do love hearing from you. I love to know what YOU think, what you watch, what you read, what turns you on and off. Mostly, I love original content…your own words and thoughts, pictures and videos. Get yourself a blog. Get a YouTube account and send me the link.

A little glimpse of life in the risers, singing with the University of Arizona Community Chorus. Here we’re rehearsing Miriam’s Song of Triumph by Schubert.

Congress Street in downtown Tucson, Arizona…the little town that could…but didn’t. You want to love this place. The climate is fantastic, the sun cheers your soul. It’s easy-going and mellow, and it has a potentially charming old downtown. Potentially. I’m downtown every weekend hoping that maybe something new will have sprung up out of the rubble. Alas, I’d sooner hope that a unicorn will burst forth from a cloud and take me on a magic ride to Candyland. Each week it seems there’s another boarded up window, another “For Lease” sign and some more traffic re-routing.

Tucson’s downtown has gone from dumpy to downright disgusting. Its heyday came to an end when the City bulldozed 80 acres of beautiful old adobe buildings to put in a soulless convention center and hotel and office complex. Walmart and the big boxes finished it off and the once hopping downtown was left to decay in silence.

Now there is a whole new generation of people who want to support a downtown, who cycle and walk to local restaurants instead of the bland-o-rama buffet at the Olive Garden. We’re even willing to pay more for items and feed a meter in order to shop and eat downtown. But the City’s urban developers have not kept up with the times. After decades of chatter about urban renewal, Tucson’s rise from the ashes has been stalled out. All we got was a massive, noisy central bus station and renovated train depot with unleased restaurant space. Oh, don’t forget the trolley tracks with no trolley.

There is a smattering of tattoo shops, a few art galleries that are valiantly trying to revive the downtown in spite of the City’s gross mishandling of its renewal. If it weren’t for David Agguire (Dinnerware art gallery) and Suzana Davila (Poca Cosa), we might as well just bull doze the downtown and put it out of its misery…turn it into something nice like a patch of bare desert or a massive kitty litter box.

This concept of Rio Nuevo has become The Great Pumpkin. We sit waiting and hoping and dreaming. But I’ve now been waiting 8 years. If you visit the Rio Nuevo website, you’d think that downtown Tucson was some rocking great city instead of the crap fest that is. You’d think from watching their videos on line that you were watching some Southwest version of Miami Vice with shiny, happy people in convertibles driving around in a state of urban euphoria when the reality is a preponderance of derelict buildings and crack addicts to greet you on your visit to downtown to Tucson. They end their video saying, “Downtown. It’s happening.” Downtown somewhere else.

And what’s with this driving around wasting gas in a sports car nonsense? It’s the car culture that destroyed downtown. The cyclists, pedestrians and greenies who live nearby who will revive it - so let’s get the marketing position right, okay? Come on City Council - you’re embarrassing us! They rejuvenated downtown Albuquerque, so why can’t we do it similarly? Until then, could we at least be real and show the real downtown Tucson?

I made this little compilation of photos of my friend Wessie…

This is not from Adbusters or the Onion. New York Times Magazine. Where will I be when my diarrhea comes back? In a hot tub with women who look like Sarah Palin. Yeah, that would give me diarrhea for sure. Darn tootin!

It’s olive season in Tucson and Aunt David is a pickin-and-a-grinnin. Each October, I climb trees with friends and pick about a thousand olives that I brine and pickle. The new crop will be ready to eat around new year’s. The most common question I get asked: Can you just eat ‘em off the tree? Why, yes dear olive enthusiast, you can. But then you’ll do some projectile vomiting and nobody wants to see that. Best to cure ‘em first. When you do, you will find them to be the best, freshest, tastiest olives you’ve ever eaten and you’ll never want to buy factory olives again.

Here is a PDF of instructions for curing and pickling: curing-olives

This is what’s wrong with America:

***

Dear DAVID A GILMORE :

Your American Chartered Bank statement for account number ending in XXX is attached.

Just use your Check Card to make qualified purchases each day between October
1 and October 31 and your name will be automatically entered into that day’s
drawing for a $75 gas card!

***

Do I need to say more??

Hilarious…

And this too…

Been thinking a lot about the crumbling empires we inhabit. It prompted me to buy a book called, “The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman.

The book is a not-so-fictional account of what is likely to happen to the planet when we the people leave for good. Chilling. And it has already happened. And when we leave a place, it becomes ruins remarkably fast. In 30 years, a place is beyond redemption. Imagine what will happen to the sprawling exurbs of America when gas is $10/gallon? What will happen to the resort playgrounds of the wealthy when the economic tides turn against them? What will happen to the US when there is no money to maintain the infrastructures…when another country holds all our debt and our currency is worthless because we overspent? What will happen once we’ve wasted all of our money on stupid wars and bailing out reckless financiers? What will happen to a nation that designed its cites without the forethought of the end of oil? Ghost town USA. Coming sooner than you think.

Look around the world and see what happened to Namibia, Famagusta, Cyprus, San Zhi, Taiwan. Look locally to see Detroit, Flint, Niagara Falls, Maricopa, AZ.

I found a blog that is dedicated to the ghost towns of the world. I suspect we won’t have to travel far to see this decadence soon. Click here to see website:

http://www.oddee.com/item_96462.aspx