I feel for my Southern California readers who are enduring triple ...

I feel for my Southern California readers who are enduring triple digit temperatures again this week plus wildfires so big you can see them from space. What a nightmare.

It was another beautiful Seattle summer day here yesterday and we actually got some badly needed showers in the afternoon which Tater Tot and I very much enjoyed on our walk. Down past the alpacas I saw this old truck and grabbed a shot.






I miss baseball!!!! While I am patiently waiting for Seattle-Toronto to play Friday night, here's a question for you. What is the biggest American crowd ever at a Major League Baseball game? The answer, coming up.






I've often spoken of my love for "media labels," those one to five word descriptive phrases we use to identify the subject of a news story. I happened upon two fantastic ones this week.

First, thanks to blog reader Mark for sending me a story on some recently released private letters from Albert Einstein, the genius behind the theory of relativity. Or, as the Reuters story identifies him "the wild-haired Jewish-German scientist..."



One of the many websites that wrote about radio host Adam Carolla recently hanging up on conservative author Ann Coulter during a brief, contentious phone interview is called Queerty.Com. They identified her as a "blonde horse-faced pundit."


I still hope one day to be the "impossibly ageless billionaire Norwegian bachelor." What's your dream media label?






Have you heard the new Radiohead CD? It's fantastic. They're rocking again. It the strangest thing though. The CD artwork for "Black Holes And Revelations" says it's by some band named "Muse." Must be an alias.






Shine On You Crazy Diamond: A very sad musical note this week as original Pink Floyd guitarist Syd Barrett died of diabetes at age 60. Though he left the band in 1968, and the music industry soon after to spend all of his time in an LSD haze, he is still fondly remembered. Except by every single person I talked to this week, all of whom said the same thing, "Syd Barrett was still alive?".






Baseball trivia answer: Did you remember that the Los Angeles Dodgers used to play at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum in the years between Ebbets Field and Dodger Stadium?

On May 7, 1959 they drew 93,103 fans for a game against the Yankees that also honored Dodger catcher Roy Campanella who had suffered a career-ending car crash the year before. New York won the exhibition game 6-2 in front of the largest crowd to see a baseball game in the U.S..






Day 24 of songs with "Summer" in the title surely looks familiar. Here's what I wrote back when we were doing "Numbers":

"Today's (song) needs no backstory, no history, no analysis. It's freaking Bryan Adams "Summer of '69" from 1985. Sing it if you know it!


I got my first real six-string
Bought it at the five-and-dime
Played 'til my fingers bled
It was summer of '69

Me and some guys from school
Had a Band and we tried real hard
Jimmy quit and Jody got married
I shoulda known we'd never get far

Oh when I look back now
That summer seemed to last forever
And if I had the choice
Yeah - I'd always wanna be there
Those were the best days of my life

Back in Summer of '69..."