After a 7 year hiatus, I have returned to painting carnival rides: funhouses, mirror mazes & dark rides at Owen Trailers in Riverside, California, where they build such things. I’m actually working for Duncan Designs Inc. of Santa Rosa, California. Working with Larry Todd, who’s been doing it all along since I hooked him up back a long, long time ago. There were dinosaurs when we started painting rides together.

Tom Wolfe just kills me. In the Sunday New York Times, he has done :

One Giant Leap to Nowhere

Why the American Space Program died in 1969. For 40 years, nobody has talked about that like this:

At last, in February 1962, NASA managed to get a man into Earth orbit, John Glenn. You had to have been alive at that time to comprehend the reaction of the nation, practically all of it. He was up for only five hours, compared to Titov’s 25, but he was our … Protector! Against all odds he had risked his very hide for … us! — protected us from our mortal enemy! — struck back in the duel in the heavens! — showed the world that we Americans were born fighting and would never give up! John Glenn made us whole again!

I’ve been saying for years that all this trying to give kids “self-esteem” is a load of crap.

Michael J. Formica says, in Psychology Today that self-esteem is bad for you.

With the increased focus on children as the center of culture, we have also become more inclined to treat children with kid gloves (pun intended). In generations past, you were a star because you showed athletic promise, unusual scholarship, or were an asset to the community. These days, you’re a star just because someone tells you it’s so. And that is the crux of the problem.

Way to go, Mr. Rogers. Who, as it turns out, was not a sniper in Vietnam, nor does he have any tattoos, but he did infect an entire generation with a bad case of self-esteem.

Yeah, I did it. I finished it. It took a long time. It was hard. Yeah, it was weeks ago. I was gonna do all this work-in-progress, on-the-spot reports as I was doing it, but of course I was too busy doing it. It almost killed me. Okay, that’s an exaggeration.

It looks like it did before only completely different.