WELCOME

Day One of this blog site.  It is linked to SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth and Humanity, a daily blog that is in its 13th year.  You know how long that is?  Picture yourself starting kindergarten, through your youth into those teenage years, and, finally, a senior in high school.  That is the life of SSfPEaH.  However, you had weekends off, holidays and summer vacations.  SSfPEaH was a daily, resulting in 4711 posts.  

I was planning to quit in my tenth year, but we had a volcanic eruption threatening Puna on the Big Island, and I was on the Hawaii Geothermal Project nearly 50 years ago where we produced 3 MW right in midst of the coming lava flow, so I felt compelled to report on the unfolding tragedy.  Then, the end was supposed to come after Year 12.  But came the coronavirus pandemic.

That blog began as a renewable energy and climate change site, but by popular demand, shifted more and more into food, travel, space, religion, Donald Trump, COVID-19 and other events of the day.

So SSfPEaH will soon shift to becoming the site where I will show drafts of some of my coming books.  Oh, this title came from the three SIMPLE SOLUTION books I published.  The rainbow one focused on my professional life in energy and the environment.  The gold cover covered just about everything else, from SETI to religion to travel.  The yellow one compiled 75 or so of my Huffington Post articles, where I went to on to publish more than 100.

Many of my postings in SSfPEaH were far too long, and people complained.  So Where are We?  Where will We Go? will be be more compact.  Why I began today is that SSfPEaH today began counting down my favorite 100 songs of all time, and will include this feature in both for a while.  #1 should be around New Year's Eve.  So here is my selection for song #100:

Today, I begin to count down my 100 favorite songs.  A whole genre, novelty, occupies position #100:

• Cocktails for Two  Spike Jones
• The Flying Saucer 1&2  Buchanan and Goodman--the first mash-up
• Surfing Bird  The Trashmen--in 1963, a San Jose radio station played only this on their final day
• Monster Mash  Bobby Boris Picket
• Purple People Eater  Sheb Wooley
• Alley Oop  The Hollywood Argyles
• Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah  Allan Sherman
• Does the Chewing Gum Lose It's Flavor  Lonnie Donegan
• Tip Toe Thru' the Tulips with Me  Tiny Tim--actually I truly hate this song
• Snoopy Versus the Red Baron  The Royal Guardsmen
• The Name Game Shirley Ellis
• Stranded in the Jungle  The Cadets
• Gregorian Chant  Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos

It came down to two:  Monster Mash (1962) and Gregorian Chant.  Love MM, but GC prevailed, for one major reason.  In my senior year at Stanford's annual singing contest, which draws a crowd of thousands, El Capitan, my eating club, wore hair shirts and sung a Gregorian Chant.  WE WON!!!  The monks first released their compilation in 1972, but did not gain popularity until 1994.  We should have put out an album, for our award came in 1962.  Thus, Gregorian Chant is #100.

The monks live in a Spanish abbey that dates back to the 7th century.  They originally sang a Mozarabic chant, but switched to Gregorian in the 11th century. Their album reached #3 on Billboard in 1994.  You can visit their home in northern Spain, located 131 miles south of Bilbao.

I've always wanted to visit that part of the world, where at one time was the best restaurant in the world, El Bulli, now closed, but the creator of molecular gastronomy.  San Sebastian, now the cuisine capital, is 58 miles away from Bilbao, home of the Guggenheim Museum.

(I am still feeling my way through with this new blog, so the layout will be adjusted over time. )

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