WE, AND OTHER PARK RESIDENTS HAD A REAL LIVE BEAR STOP BY LAST NIGHT

 UP CLOSE WITH AN IRIS FLOWER

A near-perfect weather day with sunny blue skies, a slight breeze, small puffy white clouds, and a 60F temperature that was enough to knock down the humidity factor and keep the pesky bugs out of the air.  It was a little too cool in the shade, but perfect in the sun.  Pheebs and I headed straightaway to our country road walking spot.  I could have done the half-mile walk without any problem but I could tell it would be too far for Pheebs so we did half of the half-mile and slowly walked back to the Jeep.

 FARM MACHINERY PATIENTLY AWAITING ITS WORKING TIME IN THE FIELD

 A DISTANT HERD OF TURTLES SUNNING THEMSELVES ON A LOG

Home again, I spent a few enjoyable hours puttering around in our flowerbeds.  I also took a utility load of branch and shrub clippings to the Park's yard-waste area.

 I LIKE TO SPEND TIME PUTTERING IN OUR YARD

Now, I am probably going to jinx myself here by saying that I have not had any pain, soreness, or discomfort in my right knee and surrounding leg for a week now.  My hip replacement also remains pain-free and that's been like that for about three months.

 A LITTLE BEE ON A DAISY

 A BUMBLE BEE ON CLOVER

 BUMBLE BEE IN FLIGHT

We had a real live bear go through our Park last night causing some minor damage here and there.  Resident's bird feeders were knocked down plus things were tipped over and moved about.  And, that includes our place.  Our hanging bird feeder was on the ground with its wire cage protecting a plastic birdseed sleeve bent as were two of the four metal birdie perches.  The wood platform on our bird station was also bent down with two metal brackets securing it also bent.  Other folks in the Park had similar damage with one person getting a dark picture of the bear.  Best thing for residents to do is to take their birdfeeders down at night and bring them inside.  That way, the bear won't wreck anything and will simply come to the door, knock politely, and ask if you have any spare birdseed to spare.  

 YOU CAN SEE HOW THE BOARD WAS NEARLY WRENCHED OFF THE POLE

 IF YOU LOOK CAREFULLY YOU CAN SEE THIS WIRE BIRD FEEDER IS BENT TO THE LEFT

Ellen's Groove:)) Ellen's Top Ten Metal Bass Lines is a must for Ellen fans.  You may not be a fan of heavy metal bands and neither am I, but this video clip with just Ellen on bass really shows how far she has progressed.  She absolutely nails all these intricate bass lines and I am amazed at how well she flawlessly does it.  Ellen just had a birthday last week and turned 12.  Marilyn, in the Shout Box a couple days ago wondered if Ellen is related to me and she is not.  It's easy to get Ellen the bass player and Kelly's niece Ella (Little Ella) mixed up.  Ellen is a little older than Ella.  I happened across a YouTube of Ellen about four years ago.  Having had a bass guitar and amp back in the late sixties, (which I never learned to play) coupled with my love of music, I frequent bass players YouTubes and took an immediate interest in how well this young eight-year-old girl was doing.  I joined her fan club and have been following her ever since.  Her dad is the masterful lead guitarist in the progressive metal supergroup Octavision along with Victor Wooten, Billy Sheehan, and others.  Ellen and her Mom and Dad live in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Here's a bio on Ellen that tells you more about her.  If you don't get hooked on Ellen's bass playing, you will surely get hooked on Ellen's giggles.  Ellen is also a very talented artist.

 ELLEN AND HER DOG NEMO

Pheebs and I slipped out for a walk this afternoon over by the pond and beyond but we again didn't go as far as we sometimes do.  With Pheebs still walking slow I knew she wasn't into a longer walk.  We turned around and headed for home taking a few pics along the way.

 WE NOTICED PARK RESIDENTS PLAYING HORSESHOE TODAY NEAR THE CLUBHOUSE

 DID YOU NOTICE THE HORSESHOE IN MID-AIR

 AND IT LOOKS LIKE A GOOD TIME IS BEING HAD BY ALL

 IT CERTAINLY IS THE TIME OF YEAR FOR DAISIES

Al's Music Box:)) A World Without Love is a song recorded by the British duo Peter and Gordon and released as their first single in February 1964. It was included on the duo's debut album in the UK, and in the US on an album of the same name. The song was written by Paul McCartney and attributed to Lennon-McCartney.  McCartney wrote the song when he was 16. When he moved into the London home of his then-girlfriend Jane Asher in 1963, sharing a room with her brother Peter Asher, who asked McCartney if he could use the song after he and Gordon Waller had signed a recording contract as Peter and Gordon. McCartney described John Lennon's reaction to the song: "The funny first line always used to please John. 'Please lock me away –' 'Yes, okay.' End of song."  Lennon said of the song that "I think that was resurrected from the past. The lead guitarist on this recording is studio musician Vic Flick who also played the guitar lick for the James Bond Theme. "A World Without Love" is one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 'Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll before the Beatles. ... That has the line 'Please lock me away' that we always used to crack up at."

 AN IRIS FLOWER IN OUR YARD

GROANER'S CORNER:(( A tour bus driver is driving with a bus full of old pensioners when he is tapped on his shoulder by a little old lady.  She offers him a handful of peanuts, which he gratefully munches up.  After about 15 minutes, she taps him on the shoulder again and she hands the driver another handful of peanuts.  When she is about to hand him another batch again, he asks her "Why don't you eat the peanuts?"  "We can't chew them because we have no teeth", she replied.  "We just love the chocolate around them."  

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Cracking an international market is a goal of most growing corporations. It shouldn't be that hard, yet even the big multinationals run into trouble because of language and cultural differences. For example, observe the following examples below...........
The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the phrase means "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax" depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth."

In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead."

Also in Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan "finger-lickin' good" came out as "eat your fingers off."

The American slogan for Salem cigarettes, "Salem - Feeling Free," got translated in the Japanese market into "When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty."

When General Motors introduced the Chevy Nova in South America, it was apparently unaware that "no va" means "it won't go." After the company figured out why it wasn't selling any cars, it renamed the car in its Spanish markets to the Caribe.

When Parker Pen marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." However, the company mistakenly thought the Spanish word "embarazar" meant embarrass. Instead the ads said that "It wont leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."

An American t-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market which promoted the Pope's visit. Instead of the desired "I Saw the Pope" in Spanish, the shirts proclaimed "I Saw the Potato."

Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno magazine.

In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water.

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A FOUNTAIN OF WATER IN OUR PARK'S POND

 A BIG SURPRISE AT OUR PARK'S POND THIS EVENING

With Kelly's iron infusion appointment at London's University Hospital set for 10 o'clock this morning we were up earlier than usual and on the road by 8:30.  Under cool cloudy skies Pheebs and I dropped Kelly off at the hospital's main door an hour later and then headed north out of London to our first stopping spot at the Medway cemetery to take our legs for a walk.  From there it was off to Ilderton for a Tim Horton's coffee to go.  Knowing it wasn't a real long appointment Kelly had, we didn't stray too far so we slowly dusted up a few country roads between Ilderton and London.

 MEDWAY CEMETERY IS ALWAYS A GOOD LEG STRETCH STOP

 AN ODD-LOOKING BARN

 WE STOPPED TO TALK TO SOME HORSES

Nearing London, my cell phone rang at 11:10 and minutes later Pheebs and I scooped Kelly up at the hospital's front door.  A quick stop at Wendys for some munchies to go and we blew out of London heading for home.  Under brightening skies and a few sun splashes we were in our driveway shortly before one o'clock.  Kelly's iron infusion went off without a hitch despite her not feeling well before we arrived at the hospital this morning.  That ill feeling continued throughout the rest of the day just as it has for the past number of days. 

 PHEEBS KNOWS KELLY HAS SNACKS BACK THERRE

What a surprise this evening when Pheebs and took a walk over and around the Park's pond.  Before we got to the pond I heard a splashing of water and lo and behold I could see a fountain of water shooting up into the air.   

Al's Music Box:)) Come Together is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon-McCartney. The song is the opening track on the band's 1969 album Abbey Road.  American psychologist Timothy Leary, an early advocate of LSD whom Lennon admired, met John and Yoko Ono in Montreal.  Leary intended to run for Governor of California in the following year's election, and he asked Lennon to write him a campaign song based on the campaign's slogan, "Come Together – Join the Party!"  The resulting chant was only a line long:  Lennon promised to finish and record the song, and Leary later recalled Lennon giving him a tape of the piece, but the two did not interact again.  In July 1969, during sessions for the Beatles' album Abbey Road, Lennon used the phrase "come together" from the Leary campaign song to compose a new song for the album.  Based on the 1956 single "You Can't Catch Me" by the American guitarist Chuck Berry, Lennon's composition began as an up-tempo blues number, only slightly altering Berry's original lyric of "Here come a flattop / He was movin' up with me" to "Here come ol' flattop / He come groovin' up slowly".  Lennon further incorporated the phrase "shoot me" from his unfinished and unreleased January 1969 song "Watching Rainbows". The lyrics of Lennon's new song were inspired by his relationship with Ono, and he delivered them quickly, similar in style to Berry's song. The author Peter Goggett wrote that "each phrase passes too quickly to be understood at first hearing the sound as important as the meaning".  When Lennon presented the composition to his bandmates, his songwriting partner Paul McCartney noticed its similarity to "You Can't Catch Me" and recommended they slow it in tempo to reduce the resemblance.  The band biographer Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single "pariah-like protagonist" and Lennon was "painting another sardonic self-portrait".  In a December 1987 interview by Selina Scott on the television show West 57th Street, George Harrison stated that he wrote two lines of the song.  The group taped eight takes of "Come Together", with take six marked "best". The line-up consisted of Lennon singing lead vocal, McCartney on bass, George Harrison on rhythm guitar, and Ringo Starr on drums.  Starr placed tea towels over his tom drums to further dampen their sound.  Without needing to use his hands to play guitar, Lennon added handclaps each time he sang "Shoot me!", also adding tambourine over both the solo and coda.  Taped on 4-track recording equipment, at the end of the session, take six was copied over to 8-track tape in Studio Two, allowing for both overdubbing and the easy manipulation of Overdubbing for Eque.  "Come Together" took place in the week following the recording of the basic track.  On 22 July, Lennon sang a new lead vocal and again added handclaps, both being treated to a tape delay, with automatic double tracking added during the choruses.  At Lennon's request, McCartney played a Fender Rhodes electric with McCartney later recalling that Lennon "wanted a piano lick to be very swampy and smokey, and I played it that way and he liked that a lot". Harrison added a heavily distorted guitar during the refrains, while Starr added a maraca. Work on the track continued the next day, with more vocals added.  On the 25th of July, McCartney contributed a harmony vocal sung below Lennon's part, and on the 29th of July, Lennon overdubbed a guitar during the song's middle climax.  Work on the song finished the next day, with Harrison playing a lead guitar solo with a Gibson Les Paul during the song's coda.

GROANER'S CORNER:(( A wife went to the police station with her next-door neighbor to report that her husband was missing. The policeman asked for a description.  She said, "He's 35 years old, 6 foot 4, has dark eyes, dark wavy hair, an athletic build, weighs 185 pounds, is soft-spoken, and is good to the children."  The next-door neighbor protested, "Your husband is 5 foot 4, chubby, bald, has a big mouth, and is mean to your children."  The wife replied, "Yes, but who wants HIM back?"

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- It takes a big man to admit when he's wrong, and an even bigger one to keep his mouth shut when he's right.

- If your next pot of chili tastes better, it probably is because of something left out, rather than added.

- In any household, junk accumulates to the the space available for its storage.

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A father was reading Bible stories to his young son.  He read, "The man named Lot was warned to take his wife and flee out of the city. But his wife looked back and was turned to salt."  His son asked, "What happened to the flea?"
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