Chanting

Los Angeles, Summer 1969: I'd parked my green MGB sportscar at the supermarket, and walking across the parking lot, I was approached by a young guy who started talking real fast.

Oddly enough, he was dressed exactly like me. And this is more odd than it might sound, because I was wearing a pale blue sportscoat with white stripes, over white slacks, and he was wearing identical clothes. I stared.

"Are you happy?" he demanded, "Would you like to have more money, a better job, more women? Would you like things to be better? Well it's easy ..."

He attempted to press a cardboard ticket into my hand.

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A Candle for Paul Miner

[The HobNob, today, by Billy Bucher]: If my records are correct, and, heaven forbid, they aren't always, we lost Paul B. Miner ten years ago today.

It was a very great loss.

I think lighting a candle tonight would be in order.

I hope to get some of my favorite Paul B. pictures placed here over the next month. If you have a special Paul B. thought, hit [this link] and add your thoughts.

Paul B. loved plants and gardening as much as he loved reading and writing. Spring always was very special to him. Life and friends were very special to him.

Paul B. was one in a million.

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Dogs Not Allowed

Spring 1990: Some ten years earlier at Christmas time, Adrienne had rescued Holly the black cockapoo from the Humane Society, as a Christmas present for her father. Holly, with new puppies, had been abandoned upon a freeway. The puppies were adopted fast, and Holly then found a happy home with Adrienne, back in those days in Berkeley.

Her father, back in New Hampshire, was an avid climber and one of the founders of the Appalachian club. Twice he'd taken her climbing the mountain. The first time she loved it, and the second time, becoming a teen, she hated it, as was proper.

Back in New England, he'd been a "tramp" printer. That means a printer skilled in setting type, fine art books to newspapers, who was very good and who moved from job to job. They lived in nice houses, and he built a stone fence, and he liked to garden, and often worked a midnight shift.

When he'd been a young teen, his own father had left one day, and never came back. Clifford, oldest of six, had to drop from school to earn for the family. He read and studied anyway, and became a liberal intellectual, and when the war came he met Helen the actress and a week later they were married.

So now that he was retired, living in Pacific Grove, it seemed that Holly was to be his Christmas present.

But it didn't work out that way.

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Ruru the Guru -- A message from Uncle Joe

San Francisco Yellow Pages, 1986: In the Yellow Pages that year you'd find listed "Third Ear Telepathic Answering Service" at 221-3333. If you called it you might hear this --

"Hello and thank you for calling Third Ear Telepathic Answering Service, the world's only telepathic answering service, designed to answer the question: Whatever happened to E.S.P.?

"I am your Host and Operator Ruru the Guru, speaking to you direct from the Himalaya Hideaway.

"And here are your messages for today --

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