Presents, a Life with a Plan. My name is Karen Anastasia Placek, I am the author of this Google Blog. This is the story of my journey, a quest to understanding more than myself. The title of this blog, "The Secret of the Universe is Choice!; know decision" will be the next global slogan. Placed on T-shirts, Jackets, Sweatshirts, it really doesn't matter, 'cause a picture with my slogan is worth more than a thousand words, it's worth??.......Know Conversation!!!
Sing with me in the path to the brick?,
no it is the cobble of the sewage and you are in the stoop,
it is concrete to the hose of that sea,
make a write to that is not the possible as the pen is the paddock and the key is not the swarm,
it is a hive that bee's will not honey to a drink of complete.
Remember the sky as the soar is no the eagle of a vulture's group,
it is a snail and the banana slugs,
cried to that tunnel?,
make that left o the leaves it is the important?,
no.
Shallow are the grave to the tombs that Egypt wiped to tears of the World now,
the people piled us to make the ships that get to the Viking and prude,
net to that is no the keel as the Annanuki did not kelp,
so Wees gave my grandmother pride in the story of the Ivy on the filler,
laugh with my grandfather!!
Oh how those blue eyes Fell,
a pony of the Shetlands gives more to mine,
it is grace beyond.
Ship to the Sands get to a Wave of no-Title,
this is the Clam and aye the muscle for the Pearl of the Fountain rounds at a Shy knee?,
know that the Buffalo did not Antelope,
the Crocodile said what is soap eh,
no that just gave the Island a clone to wick Ka.
We more grand to the canyon and the bridge is golden Gate,
capital to this is time on The Watch as people for got!!
Stride this with Canter,
know that the barn is those Men in the beacon of my youth,
no,
it is the strangest story of my lives and the laughter is still in my!!,
what the fuck!!
In the kid I choose to ask that horse in the comprehend of communicate,
oh for the Fell on that my see begrained to Bucket knew,
not a plural or a fashion of marriage and spit,
I gulped?,
no-way to path of what the Tuck,
tough?,
not at the spell.
A memory gross?,
nigh the hour to the Time in the Solar part of galaxies,
across the Milky Way to soar a Suhr 'till these same grossed a building made of stick and Stone,
made my heat cream to milk note,
ahead the eyes as he said never broke.
Yea Man,
what is the key to October 6th on the Year of seven Teen?
That is a steam of hot to trot and not to the toy let,
I grift to the Dragon of what is more than Rome on a state,
so what.
How is the An,
shall the field be a File to the soar?,
Well.
Challenges come to challenges Show!!
~ ~ ~ ~
Hear on the Bay that the goats got a knicker,
yea so is that stitch to the broom that my grandmother say hay,
the bale of the crop.
NORTH AMERICAN NANOHERTZ OBSERVATORY FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES
Physicists have sought to detect ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves ever since they realized Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted their existence. But only some of the most massive astrophysical events, such mergers of black holes and neutron stars, can produce gravitational waves strong enough to be detected on earth. Since the 1990s, two laser-based facilities in Washington and Louisiana, collectively known as LIGO, have tried to observe waves from such events. They finally detected the first gravitational wave last September, as announced on 11 February. The detection has made Rainer Weiss, the college dropout who invented the gravitational wave detector, a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize. Recent LIGO upgrades, including more sensitive instruments and incorporation of detectors around the world, should bring the detection of many more waves and open up a whole new way of viewing cataclysmic events in the universe. http://www.sciencemag.org/topic/gravitational-waves
Rainer Weiss at the LIGO testbed at MIT in Cambridge. He conceived the detector concept in 1972.
Meet the college dropout who invented the gravitational wave detector
By Adrian ChoAug. 4, 2016 , 9:00 AM
Nearly 50 years ago, Rainer Weiss dreamed up a way to detect gravitational waves—infinitesimal ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity. Last September, that dream came true as 1000 physicists working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), two huge detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, sensed a pulse of waves radiated by two massive black holes as they spiraled into each other a billion light-years away. The discovery makes Weiss, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, a sure bet to win a Nobel Prize, his peers say. Weiss, 83, acknowledges the prospect with some apprehension. “It will fuck me up for a year,” he predicts as he nimbly steers his silver Volkswagen Beetle ragtop through Cambridge traffic. “That’s what it did to John Mather.” The line is vintage “Rai,” his friends will tell you: blunt, irreverent, funny, and impatient with anything that gets in the way of his work.
By any measure, Weiss has led an extraordinary life. Born in 1932 in Berlin, he and his family fled the Nazis. He grew up in New York City, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a street-smart kid with a gift for tinkering who built and sold his own high fidelity (hi-fi) systems. As an MIT undergrad, Weiss flunked out, and he later struggled to get tenure there. Still, he established himself as a leading physicist and worked for more than 40 years on LIGO, one of the most audacious experiments ever attempted. He works on it even now. “He’s the best person I know with a soldering iron,” says David Shoemaker, a LIGO physicist at MIT.
Shoemaker adds that Weiss’s foremost quality is empathy. A college dropout, Shoemaker credits Weiss with getting him into graduate school at MIT without an undergraduate degree. “He sought ways to bring out the best in me,” Shoemaker says. “He also took a rather irregular path, and I think because of that and just his nature, he is really interested in helping people.”
Weiss is also known for speaking his mind. “He is absolutely 100% committed to honesty both in his physics and in life,” says Peter Saulson, a LIGO physicist at Syracuse University in New York, who worked with Weiss at MIT in the 1980s. Dirk Muehlner, a retired physicist in Alamo, California, and one of Weiss’s early graduate students, shares that sentiment. “He’s totally honest. There’s no bullshitting for Rai. There’s no performance.”
People say, 'I failed out of college! My life is over!' Well, it's not over.
Yet getting a fix on Weiss isn’t easy. An inveterate storyteller, he has clearly told his tales many times, smoothing the edges and burnishing the details. As he conjures up his past, little clues—loose threads, differing versions—suggest he’s not quite an open book. In fact, for Weiss, storytelling itself seems to serve some more subtle purpose.
In his modest office at MIT, on the second floor of a brick building resembling an old warehouse, Weiss settles behind a small wooden desk with a gaping hole in the top. Before the advent of flat-panel displays, Weiss took a saw to the desk so that he could tilt back bulky computer monitors. In a staccato New York accent, he tells his tale.
Rainer Weiss was born of a tryst between Frederick Weiss, a neurologist and scion of a wealthy German-Jewish family, and Gertrude Loesner, a stage and radio actress. While Gertrude was pregnant, Frederick, an ardent Communist, got into trouble by testifying in court against an incompetent Nazi doctor. The Nazis abducted him, and Gertrude’s family had to pull strings to get him released. The couple, who wed in 1933, soon fled to Prague, then in Czechoslovakia, where Weiss’s sister was born in 1937. Weiss says he was a happy, headstrong child. “I was probably an egotistical little bastard,” he says.
The family soon had to flee again, when U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed an accord ceding parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany. They heard the news on the night of 30 September 1938, while on vacation in the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia. As Chamberlain’s address blared from the hotel’s massive radio, 6-year-old Rainer stared in fascination at the glowing array of vacuum tubes inside the cabinet. The hotel emptied overnight as people fled to Prague.
The family immigrated to New York City in January 1939, 2 months before Hitler’s Weh rmacht rolled into Prague. “It was a miracle,” Weiss says. Unable to pass the medical board exams because of the language barrier, Frederick set up a practice as a counselor and eventually became a noted psychoanalyst. Gertrude worked in department stores, as a housekeeper, and at odd jobs. It was an unhappy household. “My father was a dictator in the true German sense,” Weiss says. “He suppressed my mother.” Both parents blamed Hitler for their marriage, he says.
Weiss says he grew up in an environment of benign neglect. “My parents were singularly uninterested in me,” he says. “My father was too self-centered and too busy with his own practice to pay a lot of attention to me, and my mother was probably deflected more by my sister.” He attended the prestigious Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on a scholarship—“My mother went over and pleaded for them to take me,” Weiss says—but he sometimes cut classes, and teachers compared him unfavorably with his older schoolmate Murray Gell-Mann, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969.
As a teenager, Weiss developed two passions: classical music and electronics. Snapping up army surplus parts, he repaired radios out of his bedroom. He even made a deal with the local toughs: If they left him alone as he lugged radios to and from the subway, he’d fix theirs for free. “They would steal things and I would have to fix them,” he says. “It wasn’t a good deal.”
Weiss’s sister, playwright Sybille Pearson, confirms that Weiss spent as much time as possible out of the unhappy home. But, as the only son, he was still something of a prince in his family, she says. For example, whenever the family moved to a new apartment, Weiss got the biggest bedroom to himself, she recalls. “He was adored.”
Nor was he a laggard at school, Pearson says. “He was bright and interested in everything and very smart.” Michael Wallach, Weiss’s classmate at Columbia Grammar, agrees. “Rai’s scientific abilities were widely recognized at school,” says Wallach, a psychologist retired from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, although he adds that Weiss really was a street-smart kid and once broke his leg in some sort of a tangle.
If Weiss did cut classes, it wasn’t to hang out on the corner, says his son, Benjamin Weiss, a historian and curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. “He was going to piano recitals at Town Hall.” At the same time, Benjamin speculates, Weiss was drawn to tinkering partly as a reaction to his family’s cerebral atmosphere. “This is a German-refugee kid with very self-consciously cultured parents, and he’s rebelling against them by doing things with his hands,” Benjamin says. “But he’s surely not rejecting doing things with his head.”
If Weiss skipped cheerfully through his youth, he stumbled in early adulthood. He applied to MIT to study electrical engineering so that he could solve a problem in hi-fi—how to suppress the hiss made by the shellac records of the day. But electrical engineering courses disappointed him, as they focused more on power plants than on hi-fi. So Weiss switched to physics—the major that had, he says, the fewest requirements.
Then, in his junior year, Weiss flunked out of school entirely. He fell for a woman he met on a ferry from Nantucket to Boston. “She taught me about folk dancing and playing the piano,” he says. Weiss followed her when she moved to Evanston, Illinois, abandoning his classes in midterm. But the affair fizzled. “I fell in love and went crazy,” he says, “and of course she couldn’t stand to be around a crazy man.” Weiss returned to MIT hoping to take his finals only to find he’d flunked out.
Weiss says he was unfazed. “People say, ‘I failed out of college! My life is over!’ Well, it’s not over. It depends on what you do with it.” He took a job as a technician in MIT’s legendary Building 20, a temporary structure erected during the war, working for Jerrold Zacharias, who studied beams of atoms and molecules with light and microwaves and developed the first commercial atomic clock. Under Zacharias’s tutelage, Weiss finished his bachelor’s degree in 1955 and earned his Ph.D. in 1962.
Other physicists say Zacharias’s approach to research—using high-precision measurements to probe fundamental physics— inspired Weiss’s. But Weiss says he owes Zacharias a larger personal debt. “He got me back into school, then he got me into graduate school, all with a very bad record,” he says. “I think that extends all the way up to tenure.” A photograph of Zacharias hangs on Weiss’s office wall.
After a postdoc at Princeton University developing experimental tests of gravity under physicist Robert Dicke, Weiss returned to MIT in 1964. As a junior faculty member, he says, he published little and didn’t worry about advancing his career. MIT’s Shoemaker says Weiss probably got tenure only for his teaching—and wouldn’t get it today. Bernard Burke, an emeritus physicist at MIT, agrees that early on Weiss was a “happy gadgeteer” who “wasn’t likely to get tenure unless he did something that did something.” But, Burke says, Weiss soon turned things around.
Burke suggested that Weiss turn his attention from gravity to measurements of so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, an all-pervading fuzz of radio waves that had been discovered in 1965 and that had been tentatively identified as the afterglow of the big bang, stretched to longer, cooler wavelengths by the unrelenting expansion of the universe.
In the late 1960s that connection remained tenuous, however. Radiation from the big bang should have a “thermal spectrum” with a lopsided peak indicating the radiation’s temperature. At long wavelengths, several groups had observed a climbing spectrum consistent with a temperature of 3°C above absolute zero. But in 1968, rocket measurements found high amounts of shorter wavelength radiation that clashed with a thermal spectrum and threatened the big bang hypothesis.
In the 1970s, Rainer Weiss made his name studying the cosmic microwave background with balloons.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
To probe the matter, Weiss and his graduate student Muehlner built a device that would fly on a weather balloon and measure the microwave spectrum to shorter wavelengths. In 1973, after three flights and a rebuild, they had solid data that fit a thermal spectrum and for the first time revealed the telltale peak. “It completely destroyed the rocket result,” Burke says. “Among those interested in the microwave background, [Weiss] was suddenly one of their stars.”
Robert Birgeneau, chancellor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who was at MIT from 1975 to 2000, says that Weiss’s work won respect within the MIT physics department, too. “He liked to have the affectation of going to a working-class bar and stuff like that,” Birgeneau says. But “people looked up to him broadly at MIT. They respected his passion and his courage in going after really important physics.”
The CMB study not only secured tenure for Weiss, but also propelled him to a leading role in the broader scientific community. In 1976, NASA began work on its Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, and the project’s scientific working group elected Weiss chair. Launched in 1989, COBE measured the spectrum of the microwaves with exquisite precision, proving beyond doubt that the CMB has a thermal spectrum. It also sensed tiny 1-part-in-100,000 variations in the CMB’s temperature from point to point on the sky—traces of infinitesimal quantum fluctuations in the newborn universe that are essential to the standard model of cosmology. In 2006, Americans John Mather and George Smoot shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for, respectively, measuring the spectrum and detecting the fluctuations.
Some physicists say Weiss should have shared that award. “It was a near miss,” Syracuse’s Saulson says. Nevertheless, Weiss’s contributions to COBE show he excelled in a role for which he says he’s badly suited: leader of a large scientific effort. “He’s a good collaborator,” says Mather, who works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “He’s also good at deciding who should do what and making sure that people get the credit they deserve.”
Long before COBE, during his wayward untenured days, Weiss hatched the idea that would become LIGO. In the late 1960s, the MIT physics department asked him to teach a graduate course on general relativity. “I couldn’t tell them that I didn’t know any general relativity,” he says. So, striving to stay one step ahead of his students, Weiss focused on experimental tests of gravity.
Weiss’s students asked him to discuss experiments in which Joseph Weber, an engineer at the University of Maryland, College Park, was trying to detect gravitational waves using aluminum cylinders the size of a footlocker. General relativity states that massive objects—such as two black holes—spiraling together should radiate ripples in spacetime. Weber argued that those ripples— gravitational waves—would stretch his cylinders and make them vibrate like tuning forks. In 1969, he would claim a discovery of the waves, which others couldn’t reproduce.
Weiss couldn’t grasp Weber’s method, so he invented his own, based on an L-shaped device called an interferometer. It splits a laser beam and sends the two beams down perpendicular “arms.” The beams reflect off mirrors and race back to the beam splitter. If the arms are precisely the same length, the light waves return in sync and recombine so that light flows back toward the laser. But if the arms differ by a sliver of the light’s wavelength, then the out-of-kilter overlap sends some light leaking out a perpendicular “dark port.” Weiss realized that output could reveal a passing gravitational wave, which generally would stretch the arms by different amounts. He let the class chew on the idea in homework and wrote a 23-page report in the quarterly newsletter of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. LIGO sprouted from that document.
Rainer Weiss in his lab in MIT’s Building 20 in the late 1970s, working on radiation detectors called bolometers.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Weiss insists the concept of an interferometric detector was already “floating around.” But others say he was the first to spell out that the detector would have to be kilometers long and to describe how to deal with the various types of noise—from seismic vibrations to the pinging of individual photons on the mirrors—that could drown out the elusive waves.
Making the experiment a reality required mind-boggling technological feats. The twin LIGO interferometers have arms 4 kilometers long. To detect a gravitational wave, physicists must compare the arms’ lengths to within 1/10,000 the width of a proton. Approval to build the $300 million project did not come until 1994, 22 years later (see sidebar, p. 534).
In the meantime, Weiss became a fixture in Building 20, identifiable by the corncob pipes he smoked until he suffered a mild heart attack in 1995. He would work until 2 a.m., says Nergis Mavalvala, a LIGO physicist at MIT who was Weiss’s graduate student from 1990 to 1997, and would stay even later to help a student. When Mavalvala failed her qualifying exams, Weiss had her attend “reform school” in his office every Saturday for weeks. “He didn’t give a damn about the exams,” Mavalvala says. “But he knew that I had to get past them.”
Weiss earned a reputation for lending nontraditional students a helping hand. In 1983, Lyman Page, who had been out of school for 5 years and had spent 2 years sailing around the world, walked into Weiss’s lab and asked whether he could work for him. “He said ‘I can’t pay you, but you can work in the lab,’” Page says. “So I worked as a carpenter during the day and in the lab at night.” Page, now a cosmologist at Princ eton, credits Weiss for giving him a chance that others did not.
A functioning workaholic, Weiss enjoyed a full life outside the lab, too. In 1959, he married Rebecca Young, a recently graduated biology student working at the Harvard University Herbaria. The two frequented the same diner, says Rebecca, a retired children’s librarian. “One evening he asked me to pass the salt and we started having this big conversation about photosynthesis,” she says. “After we had been married for years it occurred to me that he never puts salt on anything.”
Rebecca says she was often a “physics widow,” especially in the 1960s and 70s, when Weiss would travel to Palestine, Texas, to launch his balloon experiments. Still, she says, he was a devoted husband and father. Even when he was away “there was always a lifeline,” she says. On Sundays Weiss would take his children to the lab, says Sarah Weiss, the couple’s daughter, now an ethnomusicologist at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. “I never felt that I didn’t have the access that I needed or hoped for,” she says.
Through it all, Weiss has had music. “Music is a big factor in his life,” Rebecca says. Weiss says he started playing the piano at 20, when the woman he failed to win started teaching him. He plays for an hour every evening, favoring classical composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, on a Steinway baby grand in the living room of the couple’s two-story Victorian in Newton, Massachusetts. “He goes in there at 8 o’clock and he shuts all the doors,” Rebecca says. “He thinks I can’t hear him.”
Weiss insists that even after 63 years of practice, he isn’t very good. “My technique sucks,” he says. “You will recognize the piece I play, but you won’t be satisfied.”
LIGO has spotted just the type of source Rainer Weiss had hoped to see: black holes spiraling together.
Now, Weiss’s tranquil life seems sure to be upended, as physicists expect him to share the Nobel Prize, if not this year, then the next. Since the LIGO team announced their discovery in February, he and LIGO cofounders Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and Ronald Drever, retired from Caltech, have already won several prizes: the Special Breakthrough Award, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, and the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. “To tell you the truth, these prizes give me the willies,” says Weiss, who adds that he plans to use 90% of the award money to help graduate students. Weiss’s humility, expressed in the many stories in which he is never the hero, is striking. “He’s a very modest person,” his friend Wallach says. “That’s part of his charm.” But Weiss’s compulsive storytelling also seems to serve some deeper purpose, as becomes clear in what he calls “this famous story”: how he fell in love and flunked out of college.
The conversation circles back to the incident a couple times. At first, it seems simple enough. Weiss falls in love, comes on too strong, and scares the girl away. On the second pass, however, Weiss says that he wasn’t more of a lover than the woman could handle, but less than she wanted. “I had made a goddess out of her, and you don’t touch a goddess,” he says. “She wanted something more.” But that version soon fades, too. Asked whether he was popular as a young man, Weiss responds, “I wasn’t unpopular. I didn’t have any trouble getting girls.” When it came to love, Weiss says, “I had the experience.”
Wallach remembers it all differently. When Weiss was in his early 20s he fell in love with his piano teacher, a woman in her 30s. Wallach recalls that Weiss spent most of his time at his teacher’s house. “She was, not surprisingly, very taken with him and wanted to marry him,” Wallach says. Too young to marry, Weiss broke it off, he says.
Weiss’s sister questions how much any of it had to do with his failing out of college. “At that age that’s rebellion,” Pearson says. “And from the family we came from, what’s the way to do it? You drop out of school.”
The specifics of the decades-old affair matter far less than the way Weiss tells the story. He revels in changing the details, revealing a little more each time. But he never explains exactly what happened, how he really felt, or why he tells the story in the first place. Perhaps that is the point.
LIGO, Weiss’s brainchild, proved beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of black holes, the intense gravitational fields left by stars that collapse to infinitesimal points. Within a certain distance of that point—beyond the event horizon—gravity grows so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. In telling his tales, Weiss seems to create his own personal event horizon, a charming screen of words and anecdotes behind which he conceals his deeper self. For all his storytelling, Weiss remains a deeply private person.
At the couple’s house, Rebecca explains how, tinkering as always, Weiss has rigged a computer monitor to magnify his sheet music to compensate for his weakening sight. At her insistence, Weiss shows how the system works. In the living room stands his aging Steinway baby grand, the gloss finish worn to matte, the wood showing through at the corners, the top piled with sheet music. A flatpanel screen on makeshift gimbaled mount displays the enlarged music—a Beethoven sonata?—the 16th notes running up and down like staircases. The keyboard beckons.
“No,” Weiss says. “I won’t play.”
*Correction, 26 August, 12:25 p.m.: The story has been updated to reflect that in the photo of Weiss at the lab bench, he is working on equipment for measurements of the cosmic microwave background.
________________________________after some thought none of this is really my business however I will keep it in case a person has a problem and anybody needs to read it or may think I am trying to hide something. I am just make this note to remind myself to not write about things that may be used to say that I am being rude or judgmental and in reality I am just making my own observation. But I need to remind myself again that although not one person has said anything the reads on each blog is a bit high and for some strange reason the profile views on my google plus are outrageously high.
_________________________________________________________________________________ Note to self:
Removed 2 posts on 8/30/2016 at 2:33 PM and am keeping them in this area of my computer storage so that they can be easily seen should anyone feel that they need to look at whatever I may be writing or deciding to delete due to the high viewing numbers I believe this is the easiest thing to do in order to remain totally honest while deciding that I do indeed have the freedom of speech but rude may be a topic that is .... well who really knows these days.
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With all the National Media and their constant on subject of violence and horrific shootings in the streets of the United States why is the International Spy Shop ( https://www.internationalspyshop.com/ ) or why is this 'type of store' not been asked to close, move, shutdown, or why has not one person done a story on this type of 'tourist attraction' ?? The pictures alone are a terrible pass to the psyche?? The horror should shamble your dance to a full bore freeze. As yesterday in the City, I did the tourist thing and in-doing the 'Tourist Thing' I went to see a tourist attraction that actually to point and to be more to the point will include the bit-word as history in example?? The Balclutha !!!!
The Balclutha is a three-masted, steel-hulled, square-rigged ship built to carry a variety of cargo all over the world and the National Park Service opened a pier down on the wharf to include that set of incredible boats as well, as the Balclutha listed https://www.nps.gov/safr/learn/historyculture/balclutha.htm is at their harbor museum.
Being that Vessel specific was included in the 'free of charge' wonderful offer to experience and as the National Park Service offered four days this past week for all of us to be able to go see our local sights I had made the decision to go after seeing the advertised on the local News and decided to take them up on their generosity.
The Balclutha Launched in 1886 by the Charles Connell and Company shipyard near Glasgow, Scotland, the ship carried goods around Cape Horn (tip of South America) 17 times. It took a crew of about 26 men to handle the ship at sea with her complex rigging and 25 sails.
This incredible Vessel moored down on the wharf and has been in the Bay Area for all to view both coming and going, by plane, boat, ship, cars and a friend of mind used to Crew as a volunteer when I was a kid so indeed it was a huge part of my life always. As he had told me many a story and absolutely loved doing education, in fact he used to take kids to the ...well that's a segway and I should stick to this story and not go off on my mothers work with Student League of San Francisco, back to my story. He loved to work the lines and I thought to finally go. The moment was meant to be a memory magical, as this friend also, sadly and ultimately ended up by I guess some weird traditional thing taking a giant leap of faith, the only draw-back was it happened to be the gasping, suffocating reality to I as he took his life by jumping off the bridge which is why I never went to go see the Balclutha. For it was a painful and really difficult horror and at the same time this amazing man that had an amazing life, and, as in one such accomplishment, he went to night school (the years to be understood as he did so many things on a daily basis) and graduated from Hastings School of Law http://www.uchastings.edu/ becoming a lawyer, degree specific. As I remember this was really a big commitment, causing tons of stress to him, but he stuck with it and when he passed the Bar the world was his oyster and that degree was truly not a pearl, it was however a moment I will never forget.
You must truly see the pride of a Man enjoy the wonder of that incredible moment of Men and change your life NOW. To be witness to such demand, I tremble at the sight of a memory so close to my real. Anyhow obviously this joyful moment of many, many things had to be, and, life is life so I did not want to spoil it by just having to have to deal with it. I wanted to somehow embrace the entire love, the wonder of such an enduring spirit that taught many more than just I, and, also deal with the reality that his ultimate decision devastated everything that he had taught me since I was really young.
As I didn't want to deal with it, but had to also endure the truth and I knew that he was an adult and I was only four years old when he met my mother and I in an extremely odd circumstance as the two of us had been kidnapped and he was the one that picked us up at the airport back East. Truly times that multiply in dynamic conversation, BUT since nobody speaks anymore AND as I am sticking to my story I shall 'simple say' he made his bridge decision. It has been a bit different than what I have been able to thoroughly understand AND it has taken me years, and years and years and even more years to choose to go and physically see the Balclutha as I knew that not by view, not by see and by actually walking those decks I would indeed finally know that I was walking the last steps that he ever took on this earth. This was a difficult hold to not waiver in such a life that had taken so much time to educate me in and about life and the aspects thereof.
I don't want to counter your mind with my story, however that presents the HORROR of the Spy Shop all that much worse as THAT STORE is just blaring this horrid picture in its window and it was rather shocking to my day of such a hold that I nearly fell down, especially in lieu of all the News Casting all over the ENTIRE WORLD that our Country is, well I would quote somebody recently that said such disgusting barf that I will just say that that person said we all deserve it. That makes doing anything with a settled approach not difficult but makes the entire process of being out on the town more to the effect of "eyes up" and pay attention. In such, as I have been taught to be aware and the picture from the International Spy Shop is one thing but up close and personal?? or how 'bout your just cruising around in your own minds thought of personal history, well that was off the board.
Now you read all about how exciting it is and then ask the media what it is doing with reporting the constant dial of gun violence saying that nobody understands it. This is quite self-explanatory, it even has a Yelp page. https://www.google.com/search?q=Fisherman%27s+Wharf+San+Francisco+California+Spy+Shop+for+tourists&oq=Fisherman%27s+Wharf+San+Francisco+California+Spy+Shop+for+tourists&aqs=chrome..69i57.32815j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
_________________________________________took both of these posts down off google plus
I was down at the Wharf and all the ole time Crab Stands are just gone and this picture is the only one I can find that even says Alioto's on a building time and date to appropriate. As Joey had the Crab Stand outside Castagnola's and it is not only just gone it has a bunch of junk where the Best Stand in the entire city was, because it was (don't laugh) just like sitting at Danny's in the Marina!! Of course Joey had been given the old bar stools and that was a treasure that he and I always sort of laughed quietly about. What happened to all the Crab Stands as its weird on the wharf now as it is like an unhappy disneyland spot as even the tourists were stranger than usual. And, you should check out the totally freaky store a block up and in the middle across from the hotel. Its some gun place that says Spy something and it is a place you shoot people in some kind of visual video sort of thing. I will tell you those fucking guns looked real and they have a metal detector when you walk in. I went in 'cause I couldn't believe the window dressings as they were paper Men targets all shot out and I thought is this some kind of new 'Believe it or Not' sort of place. So when I went in and to the front counter I had the worst feeling but I stayed so that I could ask what the fuck it was. This gal comes up and says it is a shootem up place, 'Cowboys and Indians' and some other weird shit that I didn't quite understand. I asked who comes here and she said mostly all tourists. Why would tourists come all the way from Europe to shoot people up at Fishermans Wharf in San Francisco and she said it was very popular. All I know is that the public is constantly bitching about gun violence and that tourist joint had more guns than I have ever seen in a fucking gun shop, not that I have ever been in a gun shop but on T.V. it didn't look that stocked. As I listened about that whole orange tip thing on the end of those fuckers to know what the hell that story was all about I noticed something, YOU ARE ALL INSANE because that little orange microscopic plastic piece of whatever was not easily identifiable. So to you all in the United States, your local wharf might be the place to visit should you not have been there in a while and your shock to your wharf might deliver your tune to blaming the police for all the violence a brand new reality, called tourists.
Reginald Lucien Frank Roger "Reggie" Watts[1][2] (born March 23, 1972) is an American musician, singer, beatboxer, actor, and comedian. His improvised musical sets are created using only his voice, a keyboard, and a looping machine.
Watts refers to himself as a "disinformationist", aiming to disorient his audiences. He performs regularly on television, radio, and stage. He appeared on the IFC series Comedy Bang! Bang!, which began airing in 2012. He currently leads the house band for The Late Late Show with James Corden.[3]
Watts was born in Stuttgart,[4] the only child of Christiane and Charles Alphonso Watts. His mother is French. His father is American, and black.[2] His father was an officer in theUnited States Air Force and the family lived in Germany and Spain before relocating to Great Falls, Montana, where Watts was raised and graduated from Great Falls High School in the class of 1990.[2] Watts also took piano and violin lessons from the age of five until he was 16,[5] and has said his love for music started when he saw Ray Charlesplaying the piano on television as a young child.[6]
Watts moved to Seattle, Washington in 1990 at the age of 18 to study music. He briefly attended the Art Institute of Seattle before studying jazz at Cornish College of the Arts.[1]While in Seattle, he played in a number of Seattle bands of wildly varying genres, including Hit Explosion, Swampdweller, Action Buddy, Chiarrscuro, Clementine, Smell No Taste,Wayne Horvitz 4+1 Ensemble, Das Rut, Synthclub, Elemental, Eyvand Kang Seven Nades, and Free Space, amongst others.
In 1996, Watts became the front man for soul, rock, and hip hop group Maktub.[7][8]
While recording and touring circa 1996-2000 with Wayne Horvitz 4+1 Ensemble as a keyboardist, Watts was forced to downsize his effects pedal from a Roland Space Echo tape delay to a Line 6DL4 delay modeler, a smaller device that makes it easy to travel. He began using the Line 6 in live shows with Maktub, in order to replicate the duplicate harmonies from the recorded material. Then, he experimented with improvising entire songs in solo acts with the Line 6, while trying to sound like Tom Waits, playing initial gigs at small Seattle venues and artist bungalows. While in Seattle, Watts composed musical scores for Northwest dance choreographers and he dabbled in sketch comedy with future theatrical collaborator Tommy Smith.[9]
In 2004, after recording five albums over eight years, Watts moved to the Lower East Side, New York City. In 2005, he recorded his first solo single, "So Beautiful". Inspired byThe State and Wet Hot American Summer, he began infusing spontaneous comedic material with the beat-box-driven musical compositions.[10] He shot comedic web shorts for Superdeluxe, Vimeo and CollegeHumor.
In 2006, Watts started to branch out into performing for television and film, while continuing to pursue live performance and the creation of new performance technologies.[citation needed]
In 2007, Watts appeared on Plum TV's "Scott Bateman Presents Scott Bateman Presents" and starred in the CollegeHumor internet video "What About Blowjobs?" The video became a viral hit. The same year, he also wrote and performed the theme song for Penelope Princess of Pets, a web comedy series featuring Kristen Schaal and H. Jon Benjamin.
In 2008, Watts recorded a new special entitled "Disinformation", which features his performance at the Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theater. He also appeared in the independent film "Steel of Fire Warriors 2010 A.D." as a Mutantzoid Underling and on an episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, as well as making other various television appearances.
In 2010, Waverly Films shot a one-hour special on Watts called "Why Shit So Crazy?". The special features Watts in live performance at New York venues Galapagos, The Bellhouse, and Le Poisson Rouge, bookended with brief sketches and a music video of Watts' "Fuck Shit Stack". Comedy Central aired Why Shit So Crazy? and released the film as a dual DVD/CD package.[8] Afterwards, Watts made various public appearances including Conan O'Brien's The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour.
Watts' second stand-up special, Reggie Watts: A "Live" in Central Park, premiered on May 12, 2012 on Comedy Central in the "Secret Stash" completely uncensored to positive reviews.[11][12]
The film was made available as a CD/DVD through Watts' official website as well as Comedy Central's online store.
In 2013, On The Boards recorded a new Watts special entitled Transition, which played at various arts festivals including the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theater; it was winner of the MAP Fund Award and Creative Capital award. It is available on iTunes via TenduTV.
Watts was invited to perform at Yoko Ono's Meltdown 2013 on the South Bank in London where he was supported by[16]Mac Lethal.
In 2014, Watts contributed the outro vocal on "Holy City" and beatbox on "The Classic" from the Joan As Police Woman album The Classic. He also appeared as the last act in the season 4 premiere of John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show where he told some jokes and performed a song, hugging John Oliver at the end.
In December 2014, following CBS's announcement that Watts would lead The Late Late Show band, Aukerman announced that Watts would remain with Comedy Bang! Bang! through only the first half of 2015.[3] Watts' final episode of Comedy Bang! Bang! was on June 5, 2015.[17]
The Late Late Show with James Corden (2015–present)[edit]
Watts currently serves as the bandleader and announcer for The Late Late Show with James Corden. He has described his role on the show as "... a mix of Paul Shaffer and Andy Richter."[18] His band on the show is unofficially named "Karen".[19] Watts has a slot on the show to ask a guest a question about anything (called Reggie's Question on show clips). The questions are a continuation of his time on Comedy Bang! Bang!, and follow his preference for surreal comedy in his stand-up act.[20]
Watts's solo shows are completely improvised and consist of him singing and rapping both with words and with Sound poetry accompanying himself by either beatboxing and performing vocal basslines into a loop machine, or simply by playing the keyboard. His act also showcases his trademark style of standup comedy, consisting of him rapidly alternating between topics of discussion in both rational and nonsensical manners, making random sounds and noises, and speaking in other accents and languages at unexpected times, all with the intent of playfully and comically disorienting his audiences.
Watts is the winner of the 2005 Malcolm Hardee "Oy Oy" Award, the 2006 Andy Kaufman Comedy Award, and the 2006 Seattle Mayor's Arts Award.[21] He was also awarded the 2008 MAP Fund and the 2009 Creative Capitol Grant for the performing arts, and won the 2009 ECNY Award for Best Musical Comedy Act.[7]
