Spitball Army

[audio:Kinks___Schooldays.mp3]
“Schooldays” (1975) by The Kinks

“Don’t think of things that make you sad.  Just remember all the good times that you had.“

[audio:Blood_Oranges___Bridges.mp3]
“Bridges” (1993) by Blood Oranges

“Why’d you put all that water in our way.“

[audio:Specials__Friday_Night_Saturday_Morning.mp3]
“Friday Night, Saturday Morning” (1981) by The Specials

“I go out on Friday night and I come home on Saturday morning.“

[audio:Carole_King___The_First_Day_in_August.mp3]
“The First Day in August” (1972) by Carole King

“And we’ll chase it from the mountains to the bottom of the sea.“

[audio:Caramelize___Fish_Taco.mp3]
“Fish Taco” (2004) by Caramelize

“And, even though I cry when my Mama waves goodbye – it’s really that I miss the fish taco.”

Within a couple of hours of landing in San Diego, I was covering some old ground.  Here, through the windshield of a PT Cruiser, is the view from about midway across “Suicide Bridge” in Balboa Park, looking toward the tower and dome of the Museum of Man.  The bridge most likely has a more formal, official name, but as kids we always referred to it as “the suicide bridge,” in consideration of the tales of jumpers we had heard spun with eerie, bone-chilling horror.  Many years after leaving California, I was reminded of this locale when I heard the song “Balboa Park” by Bruce Springsteen, and its haunting lyrics of a cocaine mule dying beneath the overpass.  The beauty of the Park obscures the view of that potentially seamy underbelly.

[audio:Bruce_Springsteen___Balboa_Park.mp3]
“Balboa Park” (1995) by Bruce Springsteen

[audio:Al_Jolson___California_Here_I_Come.mp3]
“California, Here I Come” (1924) by Al Jolson

“California, I’ve been blue since I’ve been away from you.”

Thanks to Stu for this one!  There is no denying that Mo is a pretty woman.

Brings to my mind this other classic bit of horse-race announcing:[audio:Spike_Jones___William_Tell_Overture.mp3]
“William Tell Overture” (1948) by Spike Jones & His City Slickers

Here’s a viral entry.

CJ, over at Ink-stained Life, found a book list on a friend’s website.  The list displays the following 100 books (hopefully in some kind of random order – how else to explain Les Miserables at #100, well behind The Da Vinci Code?), with instructions that allow you to take stock of how “well-read” you are (according to their parameters, of course) and allow you to pinpoint some reading goals.  I played along – why not? – and my results are included in the list below.

Here’s how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Mark in red the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your blog

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo