Barry's Life in Napa Blog

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You may have seen or heard this since it's been making the rounds this week, but it is worth a second or third look. It's from the Miss Teen USA pageant that aired on Friday August 24, 2007. I like this version of the video because of the subtitles - you can confirm that the gibberish you think you're hearing is really what's being said. And now she's trying to spin it? Miss South Carolina Teen USA: 'I misunderstood the question' This is an example of how not all fame is good fame. "More Fun From AOL News Blogger: Use her words to rewrite her "answer": WIN BIG: It's The Miss South Carolina Word Scramble!!"

"...That's what the universe gives us every morning. No matter how far we have veered from reverence for the miraculous fact that we exist in a universe that we don't understand, every day we get a chance to start over..." - Steve Hawk "...all I ever had, redemption songs..." -Bob Marley I know that the proper pose for the educated man is to say "I don't watch TV" or "I only watch PBS." So I run afoul of that guideline by professing my ongoing, if tempestuous, affair with the tube. (In truth, a plasma screen doesn't have a tube, but I'm sure the nickname will keep its currency for a few decades. ) I remember the excitement when a new television station signed on in my hometown. (September 2, 1967 - you can find anything on the internet, you know?) It was KUHI, Channel 16, using the daring new UHF broadcast band, and giving us the grand total of three channels to choose from rather than the two channels we were used to. Oh, the...

The other night the Texas Rangers squeaked past the Baltimore Orioles by a final score of 30-3. (Those are baseball teams, for those who don't love sports, and that's a baseball score not a football score, for those who do love sports and know that 30-3 doesn't happen every day on the diamond.) When this game was reported by the sportswriters and broadcasters, it was described as a "beatdown." Back in the day, I might have preferred "creamed" or "smeared." In any descriptive terms, it was a very definitive outcome. There was a winner and a loser - a result you always get with baseball, even if it takes all night long. A clear and final outcome, a plainly obvious winner and loser - that's what we love about sports. And we love that clearly defined outcome because it's so hard to come by in our regular lives.There is always some level of doubt, someone else doing better than you, some question of whether he/she really loves me or just sa...

MESA, Ariz. — An Arizona woman has been charged with suspicion of first-degree murder after allegedly stabbing her estranged husband in the chest during sex, MyFOXPhoenix.com reports. ... husband, Juan Carlos Gonzales, 26, fled to neighbor Tony Ballard's home.... "I've never had a naked man run to my house bleeding, you know what I mean?" Ballard told MyFOXPhoenix.com. "She was on top and she...pulled a knife out of a bag and drove it into his chest," Ballard said of the incident. "She apologized first," the neighbor told MyFOXPhoenix.com. "She said 'Juan, I'm sorry about this.'" So I'm curious - I guess "love means never having to say you're sorry" is out of date now? August 22, 2007 (GamePro) -- Japanese game maker Atlus said on Tuesday that it would remove 150 Arm Spirit arm-wrestling machines from Japanese arcades after three players broke their arms while wrestling with the machine's mechanized ap...

Here is a simple phrase. I defy you to say that you can read this phrase and not have a visceral reaction. The first day of school. That's what it is around here today, the first day of school. I propose that the first day of school is one of the two most significant days of the year - the other being the last day of school. You can make a case for Christmas, or New Years Day, or April 15th, or whatever important day you choose, but these are all short-term impacts. The first day of school marks a true jumping off point. The significance cascades over all of us. First, there are the kids, loosely grouped into the overjoyed and the morose. The overjoyed love school, either for the learning or the social connection, and they're more than ready to get back into the classroom with their fresh crayons, or to show off their carefully-chosen outfit. The morose include the slow learners, the picked-on, the unpopular. They gird themselves for another nine months of humiliation. Both the...

You reach a certain age and you are entitled to be a little world weary. You've seen it, you've been there, you've felt that feeling - whether the world seems wicked or enchanted, nothing really takes you by surprise. And then, if you're lucky, something comes out of the blue and peels back your well-developed shell and you fill your lungs with fresh air. For some people that something is a new lover or a change of career or a trip to the south of France. For me, that something out of the blue is a grandson. (Yes, I know, I look far too young to have a grandchild, and yes, I must have gotten married when I was 13, and I appreciate the sentiment but try to make the line delivery a little more sincere, ok?) I was wholly unprepared for the emotional kick that this little kid would have on me. The best description is that of flipping a switch - that kid turned on a circuit inside me that I didn't even know was wired. It's an entirely different switch than the one th...

There hasn't been a lot of coverage so you may not have heard, but Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record the other day. He's kind of a big deal. The achievement is overshadowed by the seemingly obvious fact that he cheated by taking performance enhancing drugs. I know, he hasn't owned up to it, and I even heard one person say he took the stuff but didn't know what he was taking. (You'd think he would have gotten curious when he swelled up like He Man and all of a sudden his hat and his shoes didn't fit anymore, but hey, maybe he's just not that observant - or when they studied cause-and-effect in school he was out sick.) Bonds is not the first to get juiced in one way or another. Mark McGuire, of course, is as tainted as a doubleheader is long, and Canseco admitted it along with a number of others. You wonder if some of these guys could have even lasted in the bigs without the dope. But a little perspective is in order. If we cast our minds back to...

We came to Napa in 1986. It was three years before the Berlin Wall came down and the Mare Island Shipyard was still a major employer, keeping our subs in shape to patrol for the Ruskies. Nobody had heard of base closures, and nobody could imagine that Napa Pipe would be closed down in less than a generation. There was still a tannery in business on Coombs Street back then. Napa had no Target stores and no In and Out Burger, let alone any high end restaurants. Brewster's Army-Navy Store was one of the downtown's star attractions, in fact, and people were just starting to get serious about restoring the Opera House. Fast forward a couple of decades, and you'd hardly recognize some parts of the downtown, and particularly the Oxbow district. The town the New York Times calls a "community of diners and bowling alleys" has passed the tipping point and the times they are a changin'. There are now 17 Zagat-rated restaurants in the downtown area alone, and 13 wine ba...

There's some kind of dolphin convergence going on in Napa this week. In my Google News Alert, I saw these two headlines: Dolphin spotted in Napa , CA river Former Dolphin spotted in Napa Story one is about appearance of one or more harbor porpoises in the river in the center of town, a good 3 or 4 miles inland from the Bay. I don't recall ever hearing about any porpoises in the Napa River before, although we do get the occasional sea lion, lots of yachts, and a dead body now and then. Story two is from the sports page, and something to do with somebody named Russell who plays football. The Oakland Raiders have their summer training camp in Napa, so that means for a couple of weeks each year we get a lot of sports media, silver and black looky-loos, and a dead body now and then. Having a porpoise in the river has gotten a lot of people excited. The Napa Valley Register even embedded some video on their site, which I believe is a first for them. The line between print and broa...

If you read the Parade magazine in the Sunday paper, or watch Letterman, you might be familiar with Marilyn Vos Savant . She's that super brainy woman who reportedly has the highest IQ measured. Naturally, what you want to do if you have a really high IQ is answer questions in a newspaper column. So she does. Along the way, she gets some real doozies, questions that only make sense to the not-so-super-brainy individuals who posed them. Here are some samples: Didn’t Louis XIII have any furniture? Everybody’s heard about his son’s furniture, but what about him? — from a reader in Philadelphia, Pa. Suppose we could get all living beings on Earth to face one direction and then begin running. Would this influence the speed of the Earth’s rotation? —Waterloo, N.Y. I notice you have the same first name as Marilyn Monroe. Are you two related? —Portland, Ore. Do you think daylight-saving time could ...