Locator: 49252USAF.
Remember this? Link here.
The guys who approved $150/gallon aviation fuel made with algae, are now complaining that having the military's general officers and flag officers meet in Washington, DC, is "expensive." LOL. Link here. It gets tedious.
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The Book Page
This next month or so, my main "recreational" reading will be Silent Spring Revolution by Douglas Brinkley, c. 2022. I haven't taken many notes on the book yet, and probably won't, but what notes I do take will be posted here.
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The Bat Cave
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A Musical Interlude
A change is gonna come, Sam Cooke.
I was surprised that this song was written by Sam Cooke himself. I always thought he was a singer, not a writer.
A Change Is Gonna Come is a song by American singer-songwriter Sam Cooke. It initially appeared on Cooke's album Ain't That Good News, released mid-February 1964 by RCA Victor; a slightly edited version of the recording was released as a single on December 22, 1964.
Produced by Hugo & Luigi and arranged and conducted by René Hall, the song was the B-side to Shake.
The song was inspired by various events in Cooke's life, most prominently when he and his entourage were turned away from a whites-only motel in Shreveport, Louisiana. Cooke felt compelled to write a song that spoke to his struggle and of those around him, and that pertained to the Civil Rights Movement and African Americans.
Though only a modest hit for Cooke in comparison with his previous singles, A Change Is Gonna Come is widely considered one of Cooke's greatest and most influential compositions and has been voted among the greatest songs ever recorded by various publications.
In 2007, the song was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress by the National Recording Registry, having been deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
In 2021, Rolling Stone magazine placed it at number 3 on its list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time", and in 2025, the magazine placed it at number 1 on its list of "The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time."
Shot and killed, age 33, south Los Angeles, at a motel on 91st and South Figueroa Street. Years later, my first address in Los Angeles was an apartment off York Avenue and North Figueroa Street, specifically Newland Street.
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Reminiscing
Six months earlier I had just had my interview at the USC School of Medicine and was now beginning my trek home. This would have been sometime in October, 1972. I had four dollars in my pocket and was hitchhiking back to Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I left on a Friday afternoon about 5:00 p.m. and arrived back at college (Sioux Falls, SD) early on the following Sunday, two days later.
In the map below, it shows the route I took walking from USC School of Medicine to stand at the ramp on I-10.
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The Television Page
It looks like I may have found a new series to watch -- Clarkson's Farm on Amazon Prime. A documentary of the joys of farming in an over-regulated country, England. The series ran for four years. Wiki: Clarkson's Farm - Wikipedia. Discovered in Claremont Review of Books, page 5, Summer, 2025, link here.
It begins:
Millions of viewers around the world know Jeremy Clarkson as one of the hosts (“presenters,” they call them in the U.K.) of two amusing and amazing car shows, Top Gear (2002–2015) and The Grand Tour (2016–2024), the first produced with the BBC, the second with Amazon. I don’t watch car shows, even if they are funny and clever. I first saw Clarkson after he had become a farmer—at Diddly Squat Farm in the Cotswolds, as recorded on his show Clarkson’s Farm, currently the most humane and delightful unscripted hour on television.
The show, half comedy, half documentary, has appeared for four seasons on Amazon Prime and is Clarkson’s love letter to Britain’s farmers. The 65-year-old admires them for pursuing a laborious, unsung, unprofitable vocation threatened by local busybodies and national do-gooders alike. That’s why he calls himself a “libertarian.” As he told the Telegraph in a recent interview, “I believe in getting rid of all the legislation. There should only be one law in the country, which is ‘Don’t be a twit.’” The show tracks his long-running feud with the West Oxfordshire council, which prohibited him from setting up a restaurant on the farm, as well as his struggles against “Whitehall gobbledegook” when deciding which crops he could plant and “the government’s Pub Police” as he tried to buy one of the myriad closed pubs in the neighborhood and reopen it.
As usual with libertarians, there are deeper layers under the wish to be left alone. Clarkson admires not merely farmers’ sense of independence but also what they do, and long to do, with that freedom.
