Nick profile picture

Nick

A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

About Me

Left-handed Libra, right brained, creative type.I love a world full of color and beauty. Have to be close to the ocean. Always looking for patterns and rhythms, finding what other's have missed or ignored. Exploring a lightly travelled trail; taking the long road home. Staying up late into the night, drinking red wine and pondering abstract questions. Exploring off the beaten path. Discovering new meanings in old ideas.Sleeping until noon on a rainy day. Wearing nothing but my bathrobe and spreading the sunday paper across my bed. Drinking fresh squeezed orange juice and organic coffee. Growing an herb garden. Getting a phone call from a long forgotten friend. Rediscovering a letter I read several years ago. Making someone's day. Giving myself in some special way.»-(¯`v´¯)-» Design your MySpace with MyLook «-(¯`v´¯)-«

My Interests

Modern art, classical music, politics, astronomy, health and nutrition. History, baseball, architecture. Painting, wine, baking. Native Americans, Gardening, oceanography, journalism. Dream interpretation, mysticism, the New York Times. The Amazon River and its surrounding rain forests. Female anatomy, anything Italian, baby boomers.

I'd like to meet:

I wish a was a trapper I would give thousand pelts To sleep with pocahontas And find out how she felt In the morning on the fields of green In the homeland weve never seen.- Neil Young.I would like to meet other artists, writers, explorers and adventurers; people with something to say. Jim Morrison in his hey day; a young Walt Disney; Dreamers, actors, rockers, sensual women who write erotic poetry. Younger people with old souls; older people with joi d'vivre. Ed Ricketts, Roger Revelle; Jacques Cousteau. Ordinary people from other countries. Culinary adventurers who buy new spices every few weeks and love to cook ethnic food. Georgia O'Keefe, Tina Madoti, Annais Nin. Book store owners, ranchers trust fund brats. The ancestors of those who held Spanish land grants in the American West. The great, great grand daughters of Shoshone and Black Foot warriors. Hippies from the 60s. dot.com retirees. More Australians, Brazilians and Swedes. Retired and reflective punk rockers. Women from the South. Surfers. Famous people from history.

Music:

Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Miles Davis, Hank Williams, Joni Mitchell, Andres Segovia, the Gypsy Kings, the Beatles, Neil Young, Brian Eno, Ray Orbison, Celcilio & Kapono, Enya, David Bowie, Earth Wind and Fire, Astrud Gilberto, Foo Fighters, JJ Cale, Jimmy Reed, Dave Brubeck, the Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Smashing Pumpkins, Bare Naked Ladies, the Grateful Dead, Sinead O'Connor, Duran Duran, Earl Munroe, Tears for Fears, Pearl Jam, Queen, Dixie Chicks, Jim Morrison and the Doors, David Sanborn, James Taylor, Billie Holiday, my teenage neighbor's garage band...

Movies:

The Mystery of Picasso. Anything by Fellini. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Crash. Gladiator. Raising Arizona. I Walk the Line. Raging Bull. The Godfather. A Fish Called Wanda. Silent Running. Unforgiven. Anything by Werner Herzog. Wizard of Oz. A Clockwork Orange. High Plains Drifter. Most anything by John Waters. Dr. Strangelove. Anything by Stanley Kubrick. Rumblefish. Drugstore Cowboy. Something About Mary.

Books:

All kinds of books, and lots of them. Coffee table books with beatiful two-page spreads of breath-taking scenic beauty or photo essays of wild animals from the Serengetti Plains of Africa; books about early aviation; travel journals chronicling the nomads of Western Mongolia or the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. Books about trains; books about architechture; books with large pictures of beautiful and exotic gardens. Cookbooks; old magazines from the 1940s and 1950s. Books about movies and actors. Lots of books. Pretty much anything by John Steinbeck.

Heroes:

The Chinese guy at Tianamen Square who ran in front of a tank. The hippie in the 1960s who stuffed flowers down the rifle barrels of National Guardsmen. Ronnie Earl. Jerry Garcia. Skip Frye. Sacajawea. My grandfather. Any single mom with two or more kids.

My Blog

Why History Is Important

OK you rock and rollers, out their listening to U2 on your i-Pods, why should you be bothered with the starchy, stale statistics of yesterday?  History? Yawn! That's what you're thinking, right?&...
Posted by Nick on Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:38:00 PST

Levitating the Pentagon

OK, so I had to follow up with this: As a media stunt it was brilliant! You really have to hand it to Abbie Hoffman. Abbie Hoffman, Leader of the Yippie Movement In order to draw publicity for the an...
Posted by Nick on Wed, 28 Mar 2007 12:21:00 PST

The New Blood Sacrifice of the Techno-Pagans

Who hasn't wandered into a video arcade or even a young teen's bedroom lately and chanced upon the machine gun decapitation of a hostile aggressor, blood splattering wildly in the wake of stacatto bur...
Posted by Nick on Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:44:00 PST

An Inconvenient Truth About The Anti-Global Warming Movement

"We don't have a movement," says author Bill McKibben, one of the first to warn of global warming 18 years ago in his book, The End of Nature. "The largest rally yet held in the U.S. about global warm...
Posted by Nick on Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:42:00 PST

The Edmund Pettus Bridge

Edmund Pettus was a brigadier general for the Confederacy during the Civil War who later became a U.S. Senator from Alabama. A bridge, which crosses the Alabama River at a town called Selma, was later...
Posted by Nick on Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:21:00 PST

Chinese Blues: Love Songs of the Miao

I was listening to National Public Radio this morning, and to Celebrate the Year of the Pig, there was a segment about China's Miao community. The Miao (pronounced "meow," just like the sound we west...
Posted by Nick on Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:30:00 PST

Phantom Limb

Why do I like the Shins so much? I almost feel guilty about it. Everybody's talking about them now. They have a new CD out ("Wincing the Night Away")and I'm rather late to the band wagon that typicall...
Posted by Nick on Wed, 31 Jan 2007 04:29:00 PST

Sudden Death and Septadian Rhythms

An Atheist friend of mine once asserted that organized religion had contributed nothing positive to Western Civilization. I immediately challenged him. "What about the weekend," I asked. "Huh?" He see...
Posted by Nick on Mon, 29 Jan 2007 03:54:00 PST

Scylla and Charybdis

OK, who knows their Greek mythology? Before there was a rock and a hard place, there was Scylla and Charybdis. These two sea monsters gave ancient mariners little latitude for error. You could set rud...
Posted by Nick on Fri, 26 Jan 2007 12:34:00 PST

I have a Dream

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day thi...
Posted by Nick on Sat, 13 Jan 2007 04:04:00 PST