ROAD TO TOLUCA LAKE

At age 30, I left the harsh Minnesota winters for the land of fruits and nuts. I soon found a job as a senior systems analyst for a large computer complex near downtown Los Angeles and rented a house on stilts in the Hollywood Hills, overlooking Universal Studios in the San Fernando Valley. Six months later, I found a better job at a small computer software company next door to Warner Brothers studios. My office was officially in Los Angeles and the movie studio was officially in Burbank, both bordering the tiny community called Toluca Lake -- a small, quaint area within the Los Angeles metropolis. Soon I begin looking for a house to purchase. One day I spotted an ad about a fixer with a pool, within my price range, that was “less than 20 blocks from Bob Hope.” I didn’t know it at the time but the real estate agents in the area used Bob Hope as a point of reference – the closer to Bob Hope’s house, the more exclusive the property. In real estate, location is everything. Apparently, this particular real estate agent had a sense of humor. I bought the house. The pool was basically a swamp and cost several thousand dollars to get back into shape. Every day I drove to work, I passed by Bob Hope’s estate which was a couple of acres surrounded by high walls. I was told he had his own golf hole in the backyard – about a nine-iron shot. Not long thereafter, I married. We sold the house and bought a yacht. We lived on the yacht for six months, then sold it and bought a condo in Sherman Oaks. Next we sold the condo and rented an A-frame in Topanga. Then it was time to buy another house. This time, we found one in an area real estate agents refer to as Toluca Woods, south of Cahuenga Boulevard and north of Riverside Drive, "within 10 blocks of Bob Hope." It was a nice area. William Holden once owned the house at the end of the block. My wife and I often dined at the local hangouts where we would bump into some of the more famous Toluca Lake residents such as Jonathon Winters and Andy Griffith. The fellow I worked for was a member of Lakeside Country Club in Toluca Lake, Bob Hope’s home course. I played a few rounds of golf and occasionally lunched there. Then we divorced. My wife, bless her heart, kept the Toluca Woods house and I moved back into the Hollywood Hills. Oddly enough, I rented a place on the very same street, a little further uphill, as the house on stilts I had rented when I first moved to Los Angeles. Back to square one once again. Anyway, that’s my Bob Hope story. I never met him, or even saw him, yet he seemed to have an impact on my life. Leslie Towne Hope was born in Eltham, England on May 29, 1903. His father was an English stonemason and his mother an aspiring Welch concert singer. In 1907, Leslie’s father moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio. By way of his father’s naturalization, Leslie became known as “Bob.” In 1920, Bob and his brothers became U.S. citizens. During the 1940s and 1950s, Bob Hope was a star of radio, television and the films. He and crooner Bing Crosby were featured in several “Road” pictures and carried on a famous comic feud. Hope was also a frequent host of the Academy Awards ceremonies in Hollywood. Although he never won an Oscar for a film performance, he received five honorary Academy Awards for his contributions to the motion picture industry. Bob Hope will always be remembered for his tireless service to our military troops. He spent much of World War II traveling the globe to entertain Allied Forces. He continued this practice during later conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East and elsewhere, well into the 1990s. Bob Hope traveled off on the Road to the Great Beyond on July 27, 2003, at age 100. When his grandson asked him at his deathbed where he wanted to be buried, he remarked, "Surprise me." Thanks for the memories. ___________ Quote for the Day -- "I love to go to Washington -- if only to be near my money." Bob Hope ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and an imaginary girlfriend named Tequila Mockingbird. ___________ - -

Beyond Earth

Planet Earth is orbiting the sun at 67,000 miles per hour -- it is also rotating on its axis (spinning) at 1,000 miles per hour at the equator. Our solar system (the sun and its 9 planets) is travelling through space at 515,000 miles per hour. Our sun is a single star within a galaxy of stars, called the Milky Way. Our Milky Way galaxy, home of our solar system, is 100,000 light years across -- it would take about 230,000,000 (230 million) years at the speed of light to travel all the way around the outside perimeter of the Milky Way galaxy. There are about 300,000,000,000 (300 billion) stars within the Milky Way galaxy alone, a modest-sized galaxy compared to most other galaxies in the known universe. Our known universe contains some 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) galaxies, with each galaxy potentially containing multiple billions of stars. On a clear night, the average person is able to view approximately 3,000 stars with the naked eye. On July 22, 2003, CNN News reported that astronomers announced there are 70 sextillion stars in the visible universe. A sextillion is a 1 followed by 21 zeroes -- that's 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 known stars in the universe, more than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the entire Earth. This is not the total number of stars in the universe -- it's the number within the range of present day telescopes. The true number could be a zillion times higher. Our single star (the sun) contains 9 planets -- imagine how many potential planets are contained within 70, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 known stars (other suns). Keep that in mind the next time you complain about finding a convenient parking spot. Also, keep that in mind if you assume that Planet Earth is the only spinning orb in the universe that contains intelligent entities, such as human beings, whose intelligence is often highly questionable. ___________ Quote for the Day – “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” Albert Einstein ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where the universe is a fairly large place. ___________ - -

HOLLYWOODLAND

In 1923, a land syndicate created a new housing development on the Hollywood hillside of the Santa Monica Mountains. In an attempt to flaunt their new development, they contracted the Crescent Sign Company to erect a large HOLLYWOODLAND sign on Mount Lee, which is also part of Griffith Park. The 13 letters, on a hillside facing south, were each 30 feet wide and 50 feet high. The letters were studded with some 4,000 light bulbs, whereby the sign would flash in 3 segments -- "HOLLY" & "WOOD" & "LAND" would alternate, lighting up individually. The Poles that supported the sign were hauled up to the site by mules. The cost of the project was $21,000. The sign was officially dedicated in 1923. It was only intended to remain there for a year and a half. However, with the rise of American cinema in Los Angeles, the sign became a favorite symbol and remained in place. Over time, it sustained damage and deterioration of the unprotected wood and sheet metal structure. In 1932, the HOLLYWOODLAND sign was the scene of a bizarre incident. Millicent Lilian "Peg" Entwistle (1908 - 1932) was a stage and screen actress. She had appeared in several Broadway productions and only a single movie, titled Thirteen Women, On September 16, 1932, Entwistle leaped to her death from the "H" on the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, at age 24. The official caretaker in the early 1940s, while driving drunk, was approaching the top of Mount Lee when he lost control of his 1928 Ford Model A and veered off the cliff directly behind the H, destroying both his car and the original 50-foot tall letter H. In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of Congress entered into a contract with the Parks Department of the City of Los Angeles to repair and rebuild the sign. As part of the contract, the "LAND" portion of the sign was to be removed, leaving the sign with 9 letters, reading HOLLYWOOD. The Chamber of Congress also opted not to replace any of the light bulbs on the letters. In the 1970s, the first O had splintered and the third O had fallen down, rendering the sign to read HULLYWO D. Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy magazine, began a campaign to restore the landmark sign. In 1978, the Chamber of Congress decided to replace the deteriorating sign with a more permanent structure. Nine donors each gave $27,777.77 (totaling $249,999.93) to sponsor one of the replacement letters. The nine donors were each assigned a letter. H -- Terrence Donnelly (publisher of Hollywood Independent Newspaper) O -- Giovanni Mazza (Italian movie producer) L -- Les Kelley (creator of The Kelley Blue Book) L -- Gene Autry (actor) Y -- Hugh Hefner (Publisher of Playboy) W -- Andy Williams (singer) O -- Warner Bros. Records O -- Alice Cooper (singer) D -- Dennis Lidke (businessman) Alice Cooper had made his donation in the memory of his friend, comedian Groucho Marx, who had once joked that he would also donate an "O" from his own name. The new version of the sign was unveiled on November 11, 1978, on a live CBS television special broadcast commemorating the 75th anniversary of the incorporation of the city of Hollywood. Hooray for HOLLYWOOD. ___________ Quote for the Day -- “Hollywood is like Picasso's bathroom.” Candace Bergen ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He currently lives in the Ozark Mountains and had once upon a time, lived in the North Hollywood, CA, area for 11+ years (age 30-42), many moons ago, where he was VP & general manager & lead programmer of a computer software company near Warner Brothers Studio ___________ - -

A Pedantic Condescending Hermshot

In the late 1970s, I was a fool. I married the wrong woman and worked hard to get ahead. In the early 1980s, I regained my sanity. I divorced my wife and escaped the rat race. I owned a house, with a pool, before the marriage. After the divorce, my ex-wife owned a house and I had peace of mind. I spent the next couple of decades trying to get my life together once again. This included spending seven years bumming around the Arizona desert prospecting for gold, nine months back in L.A. doing computer contracts, a couple of years in the Arkansas hills writing four novels, doing rural field work for a data collection company in Chicago for a year, 10 months in Memphis doing a Y2K computer contract, working on the 2000 U.S. Census, six years teaching college computer courses and seven years writing a newspaper column. Several years ago, I finally made it. I once again owned my own home, paid cash, on 8 acres, with no neighbors, in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas, where life is peaceful and time stands still. So after I settled in, I sat on my back deck, watching the squirrels frolicking, beaming with pride that I had finally accomplished my goal of being free. But I soon realized I had spent so much time and energy trying to reach this point that there was still something missing in my life. Not long thereafter, I started an on-line e-mail correspondence with a woman from my distant past that I had once admired. We were in the same class in high school back in Minnesota but had never met. She had contacted me after a mutual high school friend sent her one of my newspaper columns. We were cruising along just fine, getting to know each other, phone conversations, exchanging photos. Then it happened. I mentioned in one of the e-mails that I had been busy that afternoon creating a syllabus for a new class I would be teaching during spring semester at college. I even included a list of many of the categories that made up the syllabus. I presumed it would be of mild interest to her. The following day, I received a rather abrupt, terse message in return whereby she made it clear she was well aware of the function of a syllabus, then referred to me as a “pedantic condescending hermshot.” I didn’t know if that was good or bad but the entire note, what little there was of it, had a clear tone of anger to it. Being a fairly normal male humanoid trapped on a planet half populated by humanoids of the female persuasion, many of whom tend to be slightly ditsy on occasion for no particular reason, my first reaction had to do with the possibility of a chemical imbalance and/or hormonal disturbance. Next, I checked the original e-mail message I had sent her, but remained baffled. It seemed harmless to me. I looked up the word “pedantic” in the dictionary. It means “too narrowly concerned with scholarly matters” or being overly scholastic. Since I didn’t know what the word meant in the first place, it was obvious proof that I wasn’t pedantic after all. I also looked up the word “hermshot” but couldn’t find it. So I wrote an e-mail back, explaining that my vocabulary didn’t include the word “pedantic” thereby eliminating it as a proper adjective to use when describing me. I also stated that I couldn’t find the word “hermshot” in my dictionary and would kindly like an explanation of the entire phrase. The next day, I received an e-mail, much more relaxed in tone, explaining that she had been angry at the entire male species the day she wrote the original message and that her cat often prances across her keyboard when she’s typing. She went on to explain that she meant to call me a “pedantic condescending hotshot” but the cat must have messed up the last word in the phrase, hence the word “hermshot.” What a relief. Here I was all in a dither over being called a pedantic condescending hermshot when there was such a reasonably logical explanation. It all made perfect sense -- I was being punished for being a member of the male species and a cat had written part of the note. It was all so obvious I was almost embarrassed I didn’t figure it out in the first place. The more I thought about it, the more I realized she was really paying me a compliment. Pedantic means scholarly, condescending implies a position of superiority and a hotshot is someone who is talented. She was basically telling me that I was a learned superior talent. But rather than convey her true feelings, she snarled at me in a pedantic and condescending manner. She may have been snarling angrily on the surface, but subconsciously she was subtly implying that she admired my scholarly talents and distinct superiority. As soon as I figured out the dynamics of her subconscious thought process, it became apparent how deeply she felt about me. A pedantic condescending hermshot indeed -- it’s not every day I receive such lavish praise. She’s clearly attracted to me but unable to express it properly, probably in fear of rejection. Then again, perhaps an angry snarl is just an angry snarl. So once again I sit on my back deck, a pedantic condescending hermshot, waiting patiently for my soul mate to show up and put me out of my misery. If I had any brains, I'd be content watching the squirrels frolic. ___________ Quote for the Day – "Always do what's next." George Carlin ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and an imaginary girlfriend named Tequila Mockingbird. ___________ - -

Tourists and Chiggers

There are two annoying creatures that invade my little corner of the world during the summer months – tourists and chiggers. According to the dictionary, a chigger is a 6-legged mite larva that sucks the blood of vertebrates and causes intense irritation. This also describes my ex-wife, except she only has two legs. A harvest mite is one of 30,000 species of mites. It passes through four stages -- egg, larva, nymph and adult. In the larva stage, it is commonly known as a chigger. Chiggers are prevalent throughout the southern part of the United States, particularly within a hundred yards of where I call home. They are so tiny I’ve never actually seen one but I have ample evidence they're keeping tabs on me at all times. Much like my ex-wife, chiggers prefer shade and moist areas. Chiggers live where they are protected by vegetation, such as around shrubs, plants, grass, mulch and overgrown wild areas. My ex-wife lives in Missouri, where she is protected by her latest husband, two neurotic cats and a can of mace. During the winter months, chiggers hang out a few inches below the surface, mostly discussing politics and their plans for the summer. In the spring, the adults emerge to lay eggs. Shortly thereafter, the eggs hatch into the larva stage to officially become chiggers. That’s when the fun begins. Chiggers can detect movement and have the ability to sense a food source from a great distance. Unlike most other mites, they're able to move rapidly and travel a long way to forage for food. Chiggers have a voracious appetite for flesh, especially the human variety. They'll crawl all over a person seeking a spot with a tight fit, such as under the socks or under a waistband. At 1/120 inch in diameter, they're even able to squeeze through the mesh of most fabrics. Once a chigger has found its way to the dinner table, it will puncture the skin, inject saliva and liquefy the flesh, enabling it to suck its meal. The injected saliva also contains a substance that prevents the blood from clotting and temporarily anesthetizes the area so it won’t be detected until after the meal is finished. After dining on the flesh, the chigger drops off the host. Later, the host will be left with a red bump, created by digestive fluids, which will cause a very intense itch. For the chigger, long since gone by now, a short period of development follows where the larva molts into a non-parasitic nymph that will soon mature to the adult stage. The entire life cycle takes only 50-70 days. Like everything else on earth, chiggers serve a purpose. They make us introspective and humble knowing we’re nothing more than a dinner platter for another living creature in nature's food chain. On the positive side, they keep those pesky tourists from moving down here and spoiling the ambiance. The worst thing about being a tourist is being recognized as a tourist. They're a lot like chiggers -- they make me itch long after they're gone. ___________ Quote for the Day – "I quit flying years ago -- I don't want to die with tourists." Billy Bob Thornton ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where chiggers enjoy the ambiance. ___________ - -

Confronting a Bully

When I was seven years old, I found myself under the constant attack of a neighborhood bully who was two years older and twice my size. One day he pushed me too far and I punched him in the nose -- nailed him real good. My next course of action was to make a swift retreat back to my house. Several hours later, the bully’s mother showed up at our front door. My mother, who is part bobcat and doesn't take any crap from anyone, answered the door while I lingered nearby, safely out of sight. The bully’s mother handed my mother a fresh blueberry pie, intended for me, and told my mother that anytime I felt compelled to hit her son it was just fine with her. From that day on, I never had any trouble with the bully again. I suspect I had gained an ounce of respect from him because I stood up to him. But it was a hollow victory because he just went on to bully others, while I went on to encounter the next bully in line. According to the US Department of Education, 18 million kids have reported being bullied by other kids. It’s estimated that 160,000 children skip school daily because of a bully. Statistically, one out of four bullies will be jailed by age thirty. Some of the lifelong consequences of having been a victim of bullying include anxiety, depression and even suicide. Sending your children to government-controlled public schools is like sending the chickens to mingle with the chicken hawks. Most of the teenagers who have gone on shooting sprees in their schools complained that bullies had been picking on them until they couldn’t take it anymore. Kids who join gangs, particularly in big cities, probably do so to protect themselves from the bullying of others. But joining a gang only exacerbates the problem by creating bully gangs instead of bully individuals. Years ago, I lived near a family in Arizona with two teenage boys who vandalized property, harassed neighbors, stole things, tormented teachers and even beat up their mother once. The parents always had an excuse – boys will be boys. It never occurred to the parents that they could be the problem. They preferred to blame the victims for picking on their dear lads. Human behavior is both genetic and environmental. We are born with a certain disposition and are also a product of what we learn along the way. We are products of products, of those who breed and raise us, just as they are products of products too. Sometimes, we even become what we swore we would never be. There’s no doubt that human beings have certain traits at birth. Some babies are mellow and sweet, while others can be described as rambunctious or even devilish. These basic personalities tend to remain throughout a lifetime. Anyone who has raised a litter of puppies understands this concept. Almost invariably, the aggressive puppies remain aggressive and the meek remain meek. The same is true with human beings. I suspect most bullies are the product of either overly-strict parenting or a total lack of parenting. In both cases, the child suffers from a lack of proper control. With overly-strict parents, the child becomes outraged because of the injustice (psychological abuse) perpetrated against them. They strike out at others because they're helpless at home. And they strike out at others because their parents strike out at them, thereby teaching their children that in order to get your way you must overpower or inflict pain on others. With parents who don’t provide even minimal guidance, the child feels unwanted and unloved. Neglected children become heartless adults. Children who are allowed to do anything with impunity expect to do the same as get older. Spoiled children become spoiled adults. Essentially, without positive role-modeling and appropriate discipline, children are programmed to be rotten kids who later become rotten adults. In both cases, these children are victims of their upbringing. Some are able to deal with it and overcome it, while others become victimizers, also known as bullies, and seek revenge for the cruelties that had been perpetrated on them by perpetrating cruelties on others, particularly on the innocent and defenseless. Bullies have always been with us. Dealing with them is no simple matter. If you fight back, you’re attempting to solve a wrong with a wrong and, in most cases, will only get injured. Furthermore, you can turn the other cheek only so many times. Running away is rarely a solution because you're only delaying the inevitable confrontation. And reporting them to higher authorities will almost always backfire. It’s a no-win situation. All bullies are cowards. They're angry at someone or something they cannot overcome so they pick on the weak and delight in upsetting others. They're getting even with the world by hurting someone who can't hurt them back. A victim is incapable of making good come from evil -- don't be a victim. Don’t allow a bully to control your emotions. Be strong, firm and resolute. Don't lower yourself to your adversary's level. Your dignity under duress will be much more powerful than reacting to a jerk who wants you to react. ___________ Quote for the Day – "We boil at different degrees." Clint Eastwood ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where Bully is the name of rodeo bull that enjoys flinging riders to the turf. ___________ - -

Silence of the Yams

Many philosophers believe that thoughts are deeds. If you project benevolent thoughts, you help create a benevolent environment. Projecting hostility creates hostility, etc. As we sow, so shall we reap. Cleve Backster, America's foremost lie-detector expert, hooked up a lie-detector to a plant about 40 years ago in an attempt to see how long it would take water to reach the leaves. A lie detector is a sensitive instrument that measures such things as Galvanic skin response, slight variations in temperature, pressure, rates of flow, etc. Backster quickly discovered the plant reacted "dramatically" to the experiment itself. When Backster decided to burn one of the leaves, the lie detector readings went off the charts. When he noticed the "trauma" being exhibited by the plant, he decided not to burn the plant after all, whereupon the plant became calm once again. Backster had not approached the plant with a match -- he had only decided, in his mind, to do so, at which time the plant became "emotional." And when he had decided to call off the burning experiment, again only in his mind, the plant returned to normal. In subsequent experiments, Backster had trouble repeating the results because once a plant had been led to believe something was going to happen and it didn't, the plant would retain that knowledge and not become "emotional" the second time. Consequently, fresh plants were required for continued experimentation. This led to the conclusion that plants have some sort of memory and discrimination capability. In other experiments, it became clear that the plants would only react if the experimenter actually intended to carry out the actions. If Backster was only bluffing to do something harmful, the plant wouldn't respond. Thus he concluded that plants could discern intent (through thought transference) and had a "memory" of past events. Backster conducted further experiments over the last four decades and has become one of the leading bio-communications experts in the world. For example, he discovered that an egg would react when another egg was cracked. His work tends to confirm the Gaia Hypothesis which states that the world is one huge, living organism with self-regulating capability. Dorothy Retallack is another specialist in this field. She exposed a variety of plants to various types of music. Plants that were exposed to hard rock (Led Leppelin and Jimi Hendrix) began pointing away from the source of the music, whereas plants exposed to soothing music began pointing toward the source. Through further studies, she concluded that being gentle with plants helps them flourish and being the opposite has the opposite effect. THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, is a book detailing other experiments done on plant life. Distance doesn't seem to matter when communicating with plants. For example, a chemist became so attuned to his house plants that they reacted excitedly when he made love to his girlfriend 80 miles away. In another instance, a philodendron activated by a thought impulse from a technician started a car two miles away. On a more unscientific note, my ex-wife, who is three-quarters Norwegian and one-quarter dingbat, used to talk to vegetables. She could spend hours chatting with a pod of peas or an ear of corn. She did most of the talking while the vegetables listened politely without too much interruption. One day she got some financial advice from a zucchini. Two hours later she went out and bought some brand new furniture. "It really didn't cost anything," she told me, "I put it on the credit card." I chopped up the zucchini and put it in a salad. One morning my ex-wife got into an argument with a kumquat. It had something to do with her new hair style -- the kumquat thought it made her look fat. She tried to get a second opinion from a yam but it ignored her, so she decided to snarl at me instead. Apparently, yams don't like to be confrontational. I never did communicate very well with the vegetables. They prefer to communicate with entities on their own intellectual level, such as fungi, mildew, politicians and dingbats. However, I once had a lengthy conversation with dill pickle about the meaning of life. They tend to be very good listeners. ___________ Quote for the Day – "The opposite of talking is waiting." Fran Lebowitz ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and an imaginary girlfriend named Tequila Mockingbird. ___________ - -