Play while the Blog's Away

              The sky is blue, the sun is warm and the blog is off for the weekend. 

              But wait, wait, there's more.

             This was a good week with Bobby Kennedy singing in Harlem, Dinner in a Diner with Ashley Judd, boozing on the beach with the Mad Men of London,   playing tennis with a Bernie Madoff wannabe in Paradise ,

              If you missed any of the above, now would be a good time. 

                 There's almost a year of goodies here. Like Frank Lloyd Wright's last private house and his big mistake. 
       

                     New York had another deluge of snow and still nobody seemed to notice the beautify of a blizzard in New York City You'll find a fine snort and a giggle in the wacky wonderful Coneheads at Silverstone. Or the flip side of that madness to the days of dope and meditation in The Volvo Years.
    

                  if you missed the all-time-record-breaking-hit- monster blog, The Real Allard Story:give it a click.  No, I lied; the tribute to the women who are as"sweet as honey and smile at you like you're made of money," attracted even more hits. And If you missed the 1979 Polish Grand Prix now's your chance.

Or, click on bob judd on the top of this page or slip down the right hand column to click on such gems as  my favorite, How You Look at the Sky.   Or The Kythera Chronicles to shake hands with Barbarossa.

Or just cruise through the links on the lower right hand side of this page, maybe come upon some unexpected little gem like  an excerpt from The Candle,  In Praise of the Belleville Midgets,  The Midgets of Belleville. Part II,  Truth in Grass: a Kansas adventure, The Story of the Larned Eagle Optic, Hollywood Calls, You Pick up the Phone, Hollywood Calls, you pick up the phone part 2 maybe my favorite My Short Happy War in Afghanistan or no, wait, wait, Fangio and the Maserati 250 F for the priceless video of Fangio in a polo shirt and helmet, absolutely relaxed driving a Maserati 250F around a beat up old race track with no run off, no barriers, no safety nothing.  My lunch with Rob Walker is a good one even though it leaves out the Betty Grable stories. 

 

       You don't want to miss My Short Happy War in Afghanistan

 

             Then there's Erno Goldfingers house-and-mine, which throws in Ian Flemming, no extra charge. Riding around Laguna Seca with Jackie Stewart was picked up by Jalopnik.com.

             Read  Uncle John's Prayer for guidance through these difficult days.

 

              Then there was the time my Dad,  Clarence Judd Head-Butts a Truck.  Truck dies. That's a good one. 

             And, of course, the one that started it all, Truck Story.

 

               Then Virgin calls, and Forrest goes to Hollywood to star with an Electric car. And Forrest does a shoot in bed with Virgin. That one is a lot of fun. 

                Although, you might want to take a look at Pheromone Dreams to see what they are doing in bed in front of a film crew. While you're there it's just a short hop to Nurse Pelvis. 

            Or take a dip in the world's largest concrete freshwater free municipal swimming pool.

           And for heat on a frosty afternoon, click on my dance with a prima ballerina.

 

              For a tasty bite with bon mots check out my friend, Gerry Freeman's foodie blog as  Hungry Gerald globe trots from spa to Paris and beyond.

             Or go skip over to the column on the right and click on any date or title from last year.  These blogs are evergreen as we say in the trade.

            

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

 The Blog is taking off for the Holidays.  May yours be warm and happy.

    In the meantime there's a ton of goodies here. Scroll down for the wacky wonderful Coneheads at Silverstone. Or the flip side of that madness to the days of dope and meditation in The Volvo Years.

         if you missed the all-time-record-breaking-hit- monster blog, The Real Allard Story:give it a click.  No, I lied; last week's  tribute to the women who are as"sweet as honey and smile at you like you're made of money," attracted even more hits. And If you missed the 1979 Polish Grand Prix now's your chance.

Or, click on bob judd on the top of this page or slip down the right hand column to click on such gems as  my favorite, How You Look at the Sky.   Or The Kythera Chronicles to shake hands with Barbarossa.

Or just cruise through the links on the lower right hand side of this page, maybe come upon some unexpected little gem like  an excerpt from The Candle,  In Praise of the Belleville Midgets,  The Midgets of Belleville. Part II,  Truth in Grass: a Kansas adventure, The Story of the Larned Eagle Optic, Hollywood Calls, You Pick up the Phone, Hollywood Calls, you pick up the phone part 2 maybe my favorite My Short Happy War in Afghanistan or no, wait, wait, Fangio and the Maserati 250 F for the priceless video of Fangio in a polo shirt and helmet, absolutely relaxed driving a Maserati 250F around a beat up old race track with no run off, no barriers, no safety nothing.  My lunch with Rob Walkeris a good one even though it leaves out the Betty Grable stories. 

       You wouldn't want to miss My Short Happy War in Afghanistan

 

             Then there's Erno Goldfingers house-and-mine, which throws in Ian Flemming, no extra charge. Riding around Laguna Seca with Jackie Stewart was picked up by Jalopnik.com.

              Or Uncle John's Prayer.

               Or Clarence Judd Head-Butts a Truck.  Truck dies. That's a good one. 

             And, of course, the one that started it all, Truck Story.

               Then Virgin calls, and Forrest goes to Hollywood to star with an Electric car. And Forrest does a shoot in bed with Virgin. That one is a lot of fun. 

                Although, you might want to take a look at Pheromone Dreams to see what they are doing in bed in front of a film crew. While you're there it's just a short hop to Nurse Pelvis. 

            Or take a dip in the world's largest concrete freshwater free municipal swimming pool.

           And for a fine rainy afternoon divertimento, click on my dance with a prima ballerina.

 

              For a tasty bite with bon mots check out my friend, Gerry Freeman's foodie blog as  Hungry Gerald.heads for London and Paris.

             Or go visit Elif Batumen, San Francisco's brightest and funniest writer, a fine lady to curl up with for a good read.  Here's Elif's homepage.

             Enjoy, Have a ball.  See you Monday, January 3.

The Fractured Pelvis Chronicles: Nurse Pelvis

            I’d been in the hospital a week when Nurse Pelvis came back from her vacation.

          She was short  and looked like Jaimie Lee Curtis with short legs and extra lines in her face from seeing thirty years of pain and suffering.  Her name was something like Harriet Friedman, but we called her Nurse Pelvis because she had a long story about the time she broke her pelvis and she had this kinda sexy pelvis first walk.

              I was in traction, with a cast on my arm to help the severed tendons in my forearm heal.

            She looked at me frowning. Then she smiled and the room lit up.

         “That’s not a fractured pelvis,” she said. “Your pelvis isn’t even out of place.  It’s just cracked.”

           This was true, my pelvis would take a month of traction in a hospital bed to heal enough to stand, but it wasn’t anything like the massive fractures my dad would suffer years later.

              “I’ll tell you about a fractured pelvis,” Nurse Pelvis went on, smiling happily. “We had a guy in here a couple of years ago who was fixing his roof and fell off. Knocks the wind out of him and sprains his wrist.  So he decides that is not going to happen again.  So before he goes back up to finish fixing his roof, he ties a rope around the trailer hitch on his Suburban, and the other end around his waist.  So he goes back up on the roof and over to the other side where he’s fixing the flashing around the chimney.

                "Then his wife walks out the front door, hops in the Suburban and drives off to do the weekend shopping.  He was in here for a year, his wife left him, he lost his house.

                "That," Nurse Pelvis said with a note of triumph, “was a broken pelvis.”

                As the blog said in Barbarossa, tying yourself to security is really, really dangerous.

The Kythera Chronicles: Barbarossa

             The dirt road ends and you have to walk another couple of miles to get to the ruins.  You walk through stony abandoned fields where they grew their aubergines, tomatoes and potatoes.  They had to walk three miles for water and carry their water back in buckets. 


                As you approach the remains of the site, the view across the Aegean is beautiful, but bare of life apart from the always moving sea. You wonder, why would anybody want to live in this barren, windswept promontory where there was no water, and you had to walk over a mile to your field.  Kythera has plenty of water and fertile land, but not anywhere near here. 


             The answer is the same reason the Italians built their villages on the tops of hill, to defend themselves from the bandits, rapers and pillagers who preyed on small towns in the Middle Ages. 


             This village was on a prow of rock a thousand feet high pointing out over a deep chasm.  This was the most secure village in the Mediterranean.  Why else would they put up with such a desolate, difficult spot?  Security, above all, they must have thought. You could defend the village with a broom.


              I’ve walked in that chasm below.  There are places where you have to turn your shoulders to get through, and boulders the size of sofas worn smooth as pebbles by the force of the water in the spring.  Leaning way back, the Greek sun blazing in your eyes, you know the village must be up there somewhere, but you can’t see it.  

              No one could climb that worse than vertical crag. (click on all these images to enlarge.) (I saw a baby mountain goat slip and fall.  It landed on a ledge twenty feet down, got up and shook itself off.  A man would have tumbled like a stone.)

             Barbarossa didn’t even try.

             500 years ago, Turkish Admiral, Khair-ed-Din Barbarossa, (Red Beard) landed his ships quietly at night on the beach three miles below.  He too was Greek and born on Lesbos.  So he knew the island.  He led his pirates up the road to the back gate of the fortress village. And chose a handsome teenager with a gift for a story to approach heavily fortified back gate.  A woman slept inside to sound the alarm in case of attack.  The young man whispered, “I am a traveler, and I have heard there is a woman of such blinding beauty, no one in the village can see that she is beautiful.  I have heard that she is lonely.  I have come to take her to my golden village.”

             Something like that.

              After an hour's conversation, the woman opened the gate just a little to see his face. Barbarossa and his pirates shouldered through that tiny slit.  And the Greeks who had built their village on the edge of a cliff had nowhere to go. According to the local story women dove over the cliff head first with their babies in their arms.  No one survived.

          No one has lived here since. 

          When security takes over your life, your life is over.  Security is a trap. There will always be pirates. Life is dangerous. Sure, lock your door at night.  But there's more to life than locked doors.  Live, laugh, love and love again, for on the morrow Barbarossa will get busted for possession in Disneyland.