Tag Archives: YouTube

Posted in Science

I Took Up Space in School

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by Bob Sparrow

The dunce hat had my name on it.

Those who have known me for a while don’t have any trouble believing that I probably just took up space in school, but I also was very interested in space. So, I feel obligated to tell you about this week’s big space event – the Perseid Meteor shower – named after the Greek god, Perseus, son of Zeus.

If you’ve ever looked up at the night sky and wondered what the heck is really out there, then you may be interested in the rest of this blog. If you’ve looked up and said something like, “My neck hurts”, it’s probably best not to waste any more time here.

New Moon

            For those still with me, let me tell you that this week, particularly Wednesday and Thursday, the Perseid Meteor shower will provide a particularly spectacular show, due, in part, to a new moon. You probably already know this, but despite a new moon sounding like the moon should be big and bright and new, it’s actually a ‘fingernail’ moon which gives off the least amount of light and thus makes other things in the sky easier to see, like a meteor shower.    

Meteors or as they are typically called, shooting stars, are not actual stars, but rather bright streaks of light caused when tiny pieces of space dust and rock burned up in Earth’s atmosphere. Yes, tiny pieces of space dust – how tiny? They are actually no bigger than a grain of sand! But they travel at such a high speed, between 125,000 miles per hour up to 160,000 mph, that they create a glowing bubble of superheated air up to a foot wide.

Perseid Meteor Shower – coming our way this week!

Heretofore you may have only heard of Halley’s Comet, (Just so you won’t embarrass yourself when pronouncing this name, it’s Halley – like valley, not Haley – like daily) which occurs every 75-76 years. So, if you didn’t see it in 1986, it’s not coming again until 2061 – some of us may miss that.  Incidentally, Halley’s Comet is not technically a meteor shower, but let’s not get too deep into the weeds here. The other meteor you may have heard about is Hale-Bopp, which appeared in 1997 and the reason you may remember it is because 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult died in a coordinated mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California. They tragically took their own lives because they believed an alien spacecraft was hiding behind the passing Comet Hale-Bopp and would transport their souls to a higher level of existence. No one knows where their souls really went, we just know that they didn’t go to an alien spacecraft hiding behind Hale-Bopp.


Hale-Bopp Comet

OK, back to class.  If you truly want to watch the Perseid meteor shower live, on this Wednesday and Thursday, you should get to a fairly dark place – away from streetlights or any other lights, and look in the Northern sky. Best viewing time is from after midnight to just before dawn. At that time, you should see 50-100 ‘shooting stars’ per hour! If you’re not inclined to awake at that time of night, you could take the less-spectacular way of watching it the next day on YouTube, or you could wait until next year – it comes around every year at about this time.

Class dismissed. I’ll go put my dunce hat back on,

Posted in Tributes

The Incredible Life of Don the Beachcomber

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by Bob Sparrow

Earnest Gantt AKA Don Beach

When you hear the name, Don the Beachcomber, your mind typically goes to visions of tropical beaches, tiki bars and drinks with umbrellas in them.  And maybe, if you’re really curious you wonder, was there really a Don the Beachcomber or is that just a made-up name?  Well, both!  There really was a Don the Beachcomber and it is a made-up name, but there is so much more to the story.

I had the pleasure of attending the Newport Beach Film Festival last week and saw a full-length documentary called ‘Don the Beachcomber’.  Several of our neighbors were invited by neighbor, Pam Michael, whose daughter, Britney is friends with one of the producers of this documentary.  It is a most fascinating tale, of which I’ll only be able to tell bits and pieces of it here.

I’ll have a famous Zombie or four!

To set the record straight, the person known as Don the Beachcomber was born in Texas . . . or Louisiana, no one’s quite sure, so much for setting the record straight!  But his name, which we are sure of, was not Don anything, but rather, Earnest Gantt.  At the age of 20 he decided that he wanted to travel around the world, which he did.  When he returned, he got a job crewing on a yacht traveling to Australia; after that he spent a good deal of time traveling around many South Pacific Islands.  In 1933, when he was 26, and Prohibition had just ended, he returned home and opened a bar in Hollywood and called it Don’s Beachcomber, which was tropically decorated and served a variety of rum drinks – he is generally credited with inventing the entire ‘Tiki’ genre as well as the popular drink, the Zombie.  The food at the restaurant was mostly Cantonese, which he picked up a taste for in his many travels.  He is also credited with creating the first pu pu platter. When he ultimately started calling himself Don the Beachcomber, he legally changed his name to Don Beach.  He was a cigar smoking, story-telling guy, who could bullshit with the best of them in his affected British accent.  He thus wooed to his restaurant many of the top Hollywood stars of the time, like Marlene Dietrich, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, David Niven and Vivien Leigh.

Check out the trailer on YouTube

In the mid-1930s Don got married to Sunny Sund, who became a very good business partner, in fact so good, that she took over the entire operation and opened several restaurants without him.  The most famous one was the Don the Beachcomber in Chicago, where she shared ownership with the Mob.  Don and Sunny divorced in 1940, but Don stayed on as a business consultant.

In 1942 with the U.S. at war, he joined the US Air Force and became a Lieutenant Colonel, and while he did receive a Purple Heart for being injured while on a ship that was hit, he was mostly stationed at places where military people came to rest and relax.  With his creativeness, he invented a number of ‘military drinks’, like the B-52 and the Navy Grog to name a couple, which kept the troops happy and earned him a Bronze Star for his efforts of keeping up the morale of the troops.

After the war, he had signed an agreement with Sunny, who was now his ex-wife, that he couldn’t open a Don the Beachcomber in the U.S., so he moved to Hawaii, which was then a territory, and opened a Don the Beachcomber in Waikiki. While there, he created two Polynesian Villages, the International Market Place and a series of Don the Beachcomber restaurants

The OC’s Beachcomber at Crystal Cove

Don married again and divorced again, then married again and moved, with his latest wife, to Moorea, in the French Polynesia islands where he lived happily before passing away in 1989 at the age of 82.

The trailer for this documentary is currently available on YouTube, and the full documentary should be available on various streaming services by the end of the year; I’d highly recommend checking it out.

As a salute to the most famous ‘Beachcomber’, Linda and I, along with Jack & JJ Budd, who we were staying with at their Marriott timeshare at Newport Coast for a couple of nights, went for breakfast at the Beachcomber at Crystal Cove – a great restaurant right on the sand, but unfortunately it was a little too early for a Zombie!!  But I’m going to order one next time I get the chance!

 

Posted in opinion

THE BIRTHDAY DILEMMA

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By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

Alan with his perfect present

Alan with his perfect present

Today is my husband’s birthday.  Which means that for the past several weeks I have been struggling to figure out an appropriate gift for him.  Some years he goes out and buys himself a whole set of golf clubs and then tells me that’s my gift.  But I’m old-fashioned when it comes to gifts.  I think it matters that someone puts thought into finding the perfect present.  Of course, Alan and my definitions of the “perfect” gift differ a bit.  What he really would like is a Shelby Cobra.  He has been known to make a perfect fool of himself by approaching Cobra drivers in parking lots with drool slithering down his chin.  He also would like to have a date with Kate Upton.  He hasn’t seen her in person but I’m sure he’d be drooling over her too.  The chances of him getting a date with her is about the same as me buying him a Cobra.  It’s just not happening.  So I’ve been in my usual quandary about finding him a great birthday surprise.   I was going to send him to golf school up in Sun Valley until he said the other day that he hoped I wasn’t buying him golf lessons because he has miraculously fixed his swing. This is generally what happens every year – I think of something “creative” and it turns out to be the wrong thing at the wrong time.  But I like to have something for him to open on his birthday.  I could rest on my laurels, since bringing Dash the Wonder Dog into our home racked up LOTS of gift points.   But I’ve never been one to pass up the opportunity to have a birthday celebration so I was determined to forge ahead in my quest for a gift.

The "new" sensation

The “new” sensation

A week ago I was lucky enough to get a good hint as he made his daily trek into our office to watch YouTube videos of Brazilian jazz artists.  He just discovered YouTube about six months ago,even though they’ve been pretty popular with anyone who likes cat videos for the past eight years.  He is constantly going up to friends and saying “Hey, have you heard about this YouTube thing?”.  Sadly, given the age of most of our friends, he sometimes finds people who haven’t.  He has created his own account to bookmark all of his music and, for all I know, videos of Kate Upton.  Luckily, as he was watching Ivan Lins for the 1,000th time last week he said, “Gee, I really wish I could take this music with me when we travel this summer”.  I paused.  How could I explain that he could watch YouTube on the iPad?  Instead, I saw an opportunity and immediately began to research iPods.  The next day I bought him the iPod Touch.  As long as he is coming into the twenty-first century I thought I’d drag him all the way – messaging, FaceTime and all the games he desires.  I was going to unwrap it and download several of his CD’s and favorite songs from the Apple Store, but given my success rate with some of my past bright ideas, I have left it in its original packaging.  Which means for the remainder of the day all I will hear is “Honey, can you come in here to help me download?” or “This *&^($# thing doesn’t work!”.  It’s never easy.  But I will give him this – he has a GREAT attitude about birthdays and aging in general.

Old woman birthday cakeWhich is more than I can say for some of our friends.  We know people who either hate to celebrate their birthday or are stressed out about getting older.  Frankly, I think they’re crazy.  First of all, birthdays are the perfect excuse to have a party.   Secondly, and more to the point, getting older is a privilege.  Walk into any pediatric ward at a hospital or talk with a young widow with small children and it becomes very apparent how lucky we are to grow older.  And the old saying is true – if you have your health you have everything.  Complaining about getting old seems a bit selfish or at least  self-centered.  Sure, we have more wrinkles and the bones creak a bit more, but if you’re generally feeling good a birthday should be a mark of accomplishment.  Being as good as we can be at whatever age we’re at is a good goal to have.  Besides, birthdays are the perfect occasion to eat cake and what is better than that?  So Happy Birthday to my dear husband today.  I hope he hears me since I have a feeling he’s going to have ear buds attached to him for the foreseeable future.