Wishing for a Renaissance!

         Perfectly on cue, poppies are popping and we hit the road, a colorful journey.

        Looking for a change of mind, we found California spring as we sliced the central state over the Santa Lucia mountains, through the lower end of the central valley, past the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains into the Mojave desert, through the Antelope valley to rest at the base of the San Jacinto mountains in Palm Springs. 

    California is terrific when it is green and the mountains are snow capped and

the people come to play.

    California may be a state of mind, but spring certainly is and we needed the charge. 

    Some of the reality has been simply nuts. Measles are making a comeback!

Ignorance and social media can do a lot of harm. There was a time when a parent who would not get their children the safest and best medical care would have been considered coo coo. Ditto for those who wear red hats and march locked step in support of a Dodo. There is an epidemic of dumb. 

    My WWII veteran parents could not understand why the republican party wants to throw away democracy as it embraces the very fascism Dad and his generation fought. Don't the fools read history? Can there be a bigger jerk than Mitch McConnell who endorsed the very man he condemned, and who sucked out what ever molecule of integrity that may have tried to invade the old Kentuckian. 

    To make it worse Google AI started creating Black Popes and Vikings and Asian American founding fathers. Oops said Sundar Pichai a very bright man surprised by his own genius computers. Hit pause and correct.

    That's what we did. 

    Some of us may be old and increasingly irrelevant but we can still manage a lucid thought and one of those surmises-- there is entirely too much intelligence, too many skills, and an unlimited amount of creativity, imagination and real knowledge, kindness, and genuinely good people to look and act the like the America we see today. The smart people, the thinkers, the doers, problem solvers, helpers, people of love and visionaries need to start getting more face time in our melodrama. The "professional politician," influencers, body celebrities, brainless blowhards, snark trolls, overly sensitive and self appointed aggrieved, need to hit the road and get out of our faces. 

    If you have not read the constitution, shut up. If you don't know what the Beer Hall Putsch was, take off your red hat and shut up, then go read a history book. If you want to ban a book, crawl under a rock. If you don't believe peace is the better way to live go for a personality transplant. 

    We need a Renaissance. You Dark Age droolers need to start learning the facts,  and paying attention to the life that appears just beyond your screen. Reality is what we make it, not a hateful attitude manipulated by an algorithm that takes you deeper into darkness, ignorance and insensitivity.

   Spring is going to start breaking out everywhere, soon. Breathe it in, take it into that part of you that that motivates and recharges your battery. There is a reason this is the time that tribes, and societies, and civilizations, and faiths celebrate new life, new energy. There's also more light. 

    The Renaissance started in a place where the light, and the color ignited thought and imagination, enough so to throw out the old, stalled thought and superstitions. It was a springtime of the mind and soul.

    About time for that here, wouldn't you say?

    See you down the trail. 

THE WAY IT LOOKS-THE WEEKENDER

WAITING & HAPPY

    It is a bitter sweet time of year isn't it, this emotional roller coaster of late December?  The end of the year comes as a definitive statement of either gains or losses, joys or regrets, but it runs directly into that grand and waiting portal of hope, the new year, where and when all things are again possible. Dreams and aspirations are birthed when we arbitrarily mark the turn of the calendar. Happy beginning indeed.

      Noted below in a powerful video is the chronicle of California people just an hour north of us in Big Sur. They enter this new year with an urgent need.

WINTER

CENTRAL COAST STYLE

   Stolo Winery-Cambria

   Mission Plaza-San Luis Obispo

                      Fiscalini Ranch-Cambria

    Such things are unofficial of course, but these may be the first of the California poppies of the season, and it is not yet spring.  Nor has it been wet, but here they are, on the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve in Cambria.

    Katherine and Lana-Bluff Trail-Cambria

AFTER THE FIRE
Heart felt video of Pfeiffer Big Sur fire

See you down the trail.

MIKE WALLACE, GOLDEN & AN S CAR GO

WHAT MIKE WALLACE DID TO 60 MINUTES

     I was lucky to work in the same area as Mike Wallace, when he was still one of the CBS Convention team correspondents.  I was covering the campaign for a radio group, but it put me in the same press room and general neighborhood.  Back then I thought it odd to see Wallace in that kind of role, because I thought he was best as an interviewer or interrogator and that is the point of this.

     Mike Wallace had the ability and skill to talk to anybody about anything.  He rarely, if ever, pulled punches.  He could get into places and talk to people in a way that amazed us all.  If Wallace was scheduled to do an interview, the 60 Minutes audience was sure to be even larger.  

    The original 60 Minutes team was superb, but Wallace and his pointed, rapier technique was indeed the point of the spear that took that show into the heart of America. 

      Wallace was a performer on a news magazine, an experimental approach to journalism, that took broadcast journalism into the Top 10 most watched shows. It created a new heft for broadcast journalism, proved to network executives that news was not only good for people, it could be good for business. 

     Wallace's style and punch also put people on notice.  There was an old joke "You know you are going to have a bad day if, when you show up at the office, Mike Wallace is waiting for you."  He helped "out" a lot of villains, confronted power, made it entertaining and he worked hard.  He stayed much longer than most and television and broadcast journalism were bigger and better because of it.

THESE HELP MAKE THE GOLDEN STATE

GOLDEN

With help from Sweet Talk Radio

here's a few seconds of "breath it in" time.

   DAY BOOK

NOVEL RIDE 

See you down the trail.