For Greta -- June 21, 2023

Locator: 44999MARS.

For a current photo of Greta, and most recent location where she was spotted, click here.

This song was released before the Covid-19 pandemic. Pretty prescient. Prine.

That line about Mars? Also, pretty good.

When I first explored Craters of the Moon National Monument, tagging along on a friend’s botany research trip in 2008, I marveled at the impossible terrain, which seemed as alien as Mars. Ancient lava flows unfurled as far as we could see, rippling in smooth concentric circles or breaking into craggy rifts. What should have been a mile, according to the map, stretched for hours as we carefully balanced on jagged ridges, detouring around crevices a little too wide to jump across and deep enough to swallow us whole.

I’m not the first to identify the otherworldliness of this aptly-named monument. Apollo 14 astronauts studied its geology in 1969 prior to collecting rocks from the Moon. But these basaltic rocks are a closer match to Mars than to our own moon, and they’ve been extensively studied to further our understanding of the Red Planet. Now, NASA’s goal is to send humans to Mars by the 2030s, and this bizarre landscape has become the organization’s training grounds.

The world will end most any day.

That was for Greta.

This is for the rest of us. Can you imagine seeing this? This was Santa Monica, California. High school students were given free admission to pack the arena for the two-day show. TAMI. October 28 and October 29, 1964, a Friday and Saturday.

The British invasion shut them down. The Beatles arrived NYC, John F Kennedy airport, months earlier, February 7, 1964. I guess T.A.M.I. was an attempt to stop that British invasion. Or it was the "west coast" answer to an "east coast" event.

I had never heard of T.A.M.I. until a reader brought it to my attention years ago. Thank you very much.

The previous year, released June, 1963: