Saw two movies on Amazon Prime last night.  the first was the 2015  Love and Mercy,  the troubled life of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson.  Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 89/85.  It was a good film with their songs.  The one gripe I would have is that both Paul Dano and John Cusack play Brian, and they don't look at all like each other, or Brian Wilson.  I won't say much more except to indicate that  I saw the Beach Grandads perform at the Hawaii Theater last year, one of my highlights of 2024 .   But this was not one of the best films I've ever seen.  Maybe around #1500 of the 4000 or so movies I've watched in my life.  Sounds like a lot, and the number could well have been 3000, but I've seen a lot of them over the past 84+ years. So anyway, after watching  Love and Mercy , the time was past 10PM, when I normally go to bed.  However, just before turning off Prime, I noticed several films on the screen, and one was th...

The first 18 years of my life was spent in Hawaii.  Just before starting college, I flew to stay with my brother in Oxnard to work for the summer at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory in Port Hueneme, California.  Oxnard is 60 miles north of Los Angeles. In September of 1958 my brother drove me to the Stanford Campus, located about 35 miles south of San Francisco.  I recall crossing from the west side to the East Bay area on Friday nights to the Garden of Allah, to dance and see entertainers like Bobby Preston and Marty Robbins.  After I graduated in 1962, over the past 62 years, I've returned to San Francisco at least 50 times. Mind you, I don't really like SFO weather.  It's almost always too cold for me.  Something enchanting about the fog, which comes and goes.  But bicycling to class at 7:30AM in the winter was not comfortable.  Stanford is a bit warmer than SFO, but still much too cold in the winter.  In fact, I remember on  21...

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