SWCAMBORNE

Now this is a good idea that is being done well:

http://www.acomplaintfreeworld.org/

I haven’t read the book but I like the concept.  One of their ideas is to work to be complaint free for 25 days.  If you do you can have your name listed on their roster on the web site.  Good idea!

On our trip to Maine and New England last month we visited four different small museums. As a result we unintentionally made it a focus of our trip.

Henry Moore at Storm King

By the time we realized we had a theme going on we were at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.  All four of them were founded by rich families to preserve collections and to extend the memory of the family names.  There are hundreds of little museums spread around the USA.   More photos click here.

These four are an interesting cross section of the genre. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2005 a contingent of Codger Divers went to Catalina on a dive trip.

The famed Casino in Avalon

Gene, Howard Harte and I dove with Harte’s son and niece.  Our divemaster was Ron Moore.

Ron is the handsome guy (second from the left)

At the time Ron was an employee of one of the dive companies in Avalon.  We encouraged him to start his own company and now he has:

Dive Catalina with Ron Moore
107 Pebbly Beach Road
Avalon, CA 90704
310-510-3175
1-877-218-9156
ron@ronmooreproductions.com

Diving on Catalina is cold but close and sometimes spectacular:

A Garibaldi

Abalone?

If you dive Catalina, and all serious divers should at least once, then be sure to dive with Ron Moore.  He is one of the best diver masters we have had the pleasure to dive with.

A brilliant briefing

If you listen to the politicians the economy is terrible.  But if you look at the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog you have to believe that there are quite a few people with some extra money to spend on solving some of life’s little problems.  Like cleaning out the rain gutters:

Or important weapons for office warfare:

the Marshmallow blaster and

the desktop USB missile launcher (this may be the WMD that Saddam Hussien had)

But my favorite is the diving mask digital camera combination

It remind me of the car boat combination that someone reinvents every few years.  It always turns out to be a bad car and an even worse boat.

They are not selling these products because the economy is bad for everyone and they are selling a lot of them.  They all exist because there are lots of people with surplus income who want something different.  They are willing to spend their surplus on these at best frivolous products but don’t want to pay any more taxes.  It is the dilemma of the governing class.  Meanwhile buy some of this stuff… it could make you happy for a moment before it breaks.

This is a new book by Mark Krikorian the president of The Center for Immigration Studies.

In my review on Amazon I wrote: “The New Case Against Immigration” is not a “new case”. Its arguments are based on the same fears that stopped immigration in the 1920’s. In the words of Michelle Wucker author of Lockout “they were wrong then and they are wrong now.”

The rest of my review of the book is on Amazon and is mostly unfavorable. Krikorian is a good writer and a clever manipulator of emotional arguments. One example is he doesn’t say “population growth” he says “artificial, government engineered population growth.” Of course I do the same thing with lines like “the right to live where you choose.”

You can read all of my review on Amazon here. You would be doing me a great service by taking a minute to follow the link and rate my review. Thanks.