I have added another reference page which contains the lyrics to the Star-Spangled Banner — all four stanzas. This is because most of the referrers, according to SiteMeter, to here are Google or Yahoo! searches on “land of the free home of the brave.”

Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

I’ve always wondered why I could never drive very well, even if I did learn how to drive safely after getting into several accidents. It’s in my genes:

No need to curse that bad driver weaving in and out of the lane in front of you — he cannot help it, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

They found that people with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people with a different DNA sequence.

The study may explain why there are so many bad drivers out there — about 30 percent of Americans have the variant, the team at the University of California Irvine found.

Now, I’ve not been tested as my health insurance probably won’t cover it — it’s all I can do to manage to pay the premiums (and forget those deductibles) — but this may be the reason for that five foot-long dent in the side of my truck…

Today is Jon’s 50th birthday. He thinks he’s “old” now, but he’s always looked 10 years younger than he really is — not one gray hair on his entire head.

For his birthday, Jon is going to paint the wall where the air conditioning installers finally dry-walled over the holes they had to make to install our new ductless mini-split AC system. Big fun there…

And, of course I am going to pull a party out of my ass, which is something I am pretty good at.

The rural Australian town of Bundanoon has banned the sale of bottled water — and it’s possibly the first town in the whole world to ever do so.

And they may not be the last as more and more people are beginning to recognize that bottled water is not only a scam, it’s bad for the environment as well. Producing and trucking clean water, in single-serving containers, requires a lot of energy, and landfills are getting filled with empty water bottles.

Over the past few years, at least 60 cities in the United States and a handful of others in Canada and the United Kingdom have agreed to stop spending taxpayer dollars on bottled water, which is often consumed during city meetings, said Deborah Lapidus, organizer of Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign in the U.S.

But the Boston-based nonprofit corporate watchdog has never heard of a community banning the sale of bottled water, she said.
“I think what this town is doing is taking it one step further and recognizing that there’s safe drinking water coming out of our taps,” she said.

Bundanoon’s battle against the bottle has been brewing for years, ever since a Sydney-based beverage company announced plans to build a water extraction plant in the town. Residents were furious over the prospect of an outsider taking their water, trucking it up to Sydney for processing and then selling it back to them. The town is still fighting the company’s proposal in court.

Then in March, Huw Kingston, who owns the town’s combination cafe and bike shop, had a thought: If the town was so against hosting a water bottling company, why not ban the end product?

…

The measure will not impose penalties on those who don’t comply when it goes into effect in September. Still, all the business owners voluntarily agreed to follow it, recognizing the financial and environmental drawbacks of bottled water, Kingston said.

On Wednesday, 356 people turned up for a vote — the biggest turnout ever at a town meeting.

Only two people voted no. One said he was worried banning bottled water would encourage people to drink sugary beverages. The other was Geoff Parker, director of the Australasian Bottled Water Institute — which represents the bottled water industry.

Now, living in Florida, which is one of the few places on Earth where drinking bottled water makes some sense because the tap water tastes really terrible due to the large amounts of lime and chlorine in it, I am somewhat torn as I recognize that bottled water is a rip-off and a waste of environmental resources, but also that the tap water here, while perfectly clean and safe, tastes nasty.

But, since there are many options for improving the taste of Florida tap water — such as pitchers and taps with water filters, and refrigerators with built-in water filtration systems — there’s still little to no justification for folks to pay for a bottle of water as they would a bottle of soda or juice, and then to discard it into the trash where it will sit, perhaps for centuries, in a landfill with millions — maybe even billions — of other little plastic bottles.

Here is some music I created in my virtual studio. I wrote all of them as MIDIs in Cakewalk on a PC, and then converted them to MP3s with GarageBand on an iMac.

Truth to tell, I can’t actually play all that well (and some parts of my songs probably can’t be played by humans anyway) but I understand music theory well enough to write music on a computer, which can play every note perfectly.

It’s lots of fun. But go ahead and tell me I suck, if that’s what ya think — anything’s better than being ignored.