Got to see Chicago/ Beach Boys double headline back in 1989 (I think). Both bands were great. Saw the Beach Boys at the old Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, OH about 5 years later and it was a great show.

Bad Company Holy Water tour. Brian Howe was front lining the band and he was great, but really would have preferred to have seen Paul Rodgers.

Black Crowes opening for ZZ Top on the Recycler tour. ZZ Top had a great show, but musically, Black Crowes was much better.

Duran Duran … I was a closet fan of theirs back in my teens. I’m not in the closet any longer. Soup Dragons opened for them and they suuuucked.

Linkin Park opening for Metallica at the Atlanta Braves stadium in 2003. They were great, Metallica was meh, but I’ve never been a huge fan of theirs.

Live… Not a big fan of theirs, but they did have a good live show. (see what I did there! Yes, I’m a Dad.) They opened for the Counting Crows who were great too.

Santana is a lot better live than anywhere else. I saw him on the Supernatural tour, or at least that was the album he had just released. Funny side story about this concert. This was in 1999 and was there with a friend. 25 years later, my wife and I were talking about concerts we have attended over the years. She mentioned she went to see Santana when she first moved to Cincinnati, which is where I lived at the time… Turns out we were at the same concert 5 years before we met and didn’t realize it until last year.

Yes, I’m old.

My college girlfriend bought me a tri-fold wallet for my 20th birthday. It is still in daily use.

Why? It is an expensive and well made wallet and it has always felt “right” in my back pocket. While it shows obvious signs of wear, all the stitching is still in perfect shape.

That girlfriend dumped me, after 3 years of dating, for a guy that owned a fancier car. She contacted me two years later looking to get back together. I told her to pound sand, but I still use the wallet.

Thanks for the wallet Shannon… It doesn’t remind me of you, but it is a good wallet.

Just remembered, she bought me the Led Zeppelin box set for Christmas that same year. It is currently sitting in my closet. I still “use” it, but I’ve long ripped the discs to FLAC files and listen to them via my Plex server.

So two things from the same girlfriend.

I will be turning 55 next month.

Brilliant.

You are the Universe experiencing itself.

Solid recipes that tend toward being simple and easy to make, but still taste great. I have several of his books in my cookbook collection. With that said, I don’t reach for them nearly as much as some others. For reference cooking is a full on hobby for me. I have multiple bookshelves full of cookbooks.

His “Kinda Spaghetti Bolognese” is a family favorite and I make it several times a year.

As to what I think of Jamie himself? Honestly, I don’t know anything about him, other than he’s British. Entertainment celebrities is not a subject that holds any interest for me.

In the pantheon of cooks, whose recipes I’ve made:

He’s a LOT better than Rachael Ray (but who isn’t?).

But not quite as good as a Julia Child, Ina Garten, Charlie Trotter (RIP), or Jonathan Best.

That I’ve met personally?

Don’t know, but here’s a list that I consider the coolest people I’ve personally met and I’ll give a brief synopsis on how I met them:

Neil Armstrong: Went to get a haircut in Loveland, OH where I was living at the time. Walked into an old school barber shop that was on Loveland-Medaira RD, just down from Krogers. There were three men in the shop, the barber, who was cutting the hair of a man in the chair, and one more who was reading a newspaper, so I couldn’t see his face. The barber finished up and looked at the gentleman reading the newspapers and said; “Neil you’re up next.” The man put the newspaper down and I found myself face to face with the first man to walk on the moon. Yeah… It was a trip to say the least. He lived in the town next to Loveland and he was there looking for a new barber, as his previous one was a bit of a creep.

Paul Tibbets: My Demonstration Skydiving team was performing in an airshow at Lunken Airport on the east side of Cincinnati. Col Tibbets was there as part of a Hiroshima presentation. After my team wrapped up after the show I toured the displays. I had my team shirt on and walked up to the table where he was sitting. He asked a few questions and said my team and I were really brave doing demo jumps… Yeah… the guy that dropped the first nuclear bomb called my team and I… Brave… Rather a surreal moment for me. He was really interesting to talk to.

Chuck Yeager: Gen Yeager drove the pace car for the 1986 Indy 500. My high school marching band also was marching in the parades and around the track. Yes, I’m really old, I was 16 that year. Some friends and I were walking around the campus where we were staying and actually just ran into him… Literally. I knew who he was, but none of my friends did not, so I didn’t say anything. He gruffly dismissed us and walked off. Yes, we did apologize for running into him.

James Doohan: He gave a presentation at Indiana University Southeast in the early 80’s and my Dad took me to see it. He never announced that he was staying afterward and for some reason my Dad and I hung around after most everyone left. There was only about 8 people that were in the auditorium and we got time to talk directly to him. He was the type of person that you just… Loved. He was an actual good person who was also very intelligent. I actually cried when he died in 2005.

Anyway, that’s my submission of people that I think of as “cool” that I had direct interactions with. Other’s than that I would consider cool:

John Young: Robert Crippen, in an interview, stated that his heart rate while Columbia was sitting on the pad, for its first launch was over 140. John’s was 70. Yeah, John Young was sitting on top of thousands of pounds of brand new untested rocket and wasn’t bothered in the least… FUCK ME. If that ain’t cool, I don’t know what is. I never got to meet him, unfortunately.

Doing a Horny Gorilla skydive with 5 friends.

Representative photo of a Horny Gorilla not a photo of me or my friends:

We get into the formation, actually get stable and the next thing we all see is a one jumpers deployment bag, with their main parachute in it, come out from his back. Goes above the formation, then the deployment bag comes down into the middle of the formation… goes back up… comes back down. Lines are streaming all around and it’s turning into a really dangerous situation. Getting tied up in the lines, while in free fall has a great chance of being fatal.

But it was just a surreal moment for all of us, seeing this deployment bag dancing around in the middle of the Horny Gorilla.

The person next to the jumper with the deployment bag out, reaches down and pulls the affected jumper’s Pilot Chute, which is what actually deploys the main, and tosses it into the air stream. The affected jumper went flying out of the formation as his main parachute deployed. The rest of us break and track hard.

The guy actually landed his main parachute! He did not end up cutting away and pulling his reserve. The way that deployment bag just danced in an out of the middle of the formation was just unreal and we all just stared at it for what seemed an eternity.

25 years on and we all still talk about it.