To be on your own…
Like a complete unknown.
That’s how rock legend Bob Dylan was treated by police in one New Jersey shore community last month when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.
Dylan was in Long Branch, N.J., on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in Lakewood that night.
Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley says a 24-year-old police officer was apparently unaware of who Dylan was and asked him for identification.
The singer wasn’t carrying any, so police took him back to his hotel, where tour staff vouched for him. No charges were filed.
How did it feel? A Dylan publicist did not immediately return a call seeking comment Friday.
Ana is coming!… and I’m going!
Tropical storm Ana, the first named storm of the season, is heading towards Florida. Guess who’s going to Florida on Wednesday? Yep, I’ll be there from Wednesday until Sunday. I’m going to spend a couple days with my aunt and a couple days in St. Pete. Here is Ana’s projected path.
I was in Florida during what was called “The Storm of the Century” in 1993. It wasn’t a hurricane but it had 90 MPH winds for a 24 hour period. It went up the entire easter coast of the U.S. Some areas got up to 16 inches of rain from the storm. A large piece of the roof blew off of our hotel and landed on some cars in the parking lot. I saw newspaper boxes rolling down the street being pushed by the strong winds. We walked out onto the beach and were sandblasted as we had to lean into the wind to keep from being blown away. It was something to experience.
Graphic courtesy of Mike F
Plausible stories
Mike F writes that Grog’s history lesson got him to thinking about having B&P readers come up with some plausible stories.
Here is Mike’s story on how Bits & Pieces came to be:
When Jon Cohen was a young man he met a fellow soldier, Bob, who had been stationed in Australia so he decided to take a visit there once he retired from the military to see his old friend. They had been kicking around the idea of starting up a website for fun stuff but his friend’s wife was opposed to it. The woman, whose name is Mali, thought owning a website would be paramount to inviting all sorts of hacker attacks and identity theft and millions of spam mail a day!
Jon and his friend had wanted users of the site to send in their favorite photos of hot women they knew, or saw on the net, and the original name of the site was going to be “Pieces of Ate”. Well, again Mali thought that was a bad idea, and the two men were at wit’s end to find some way to get a website going and at the same time get Bob’s wife onboard with the project.
As it turns out, they found a computer expert to assure Mali it was safe to operate a website. They tested the site and she used her phobia to create the first user account, which was Bitscared, because she was more than a bit scared of what might happen if they opened up the site. Her fears of hacker attacks were proved unfounded but she was adamant about the name, “Pieces of Ate” was not going to be used. Finally, Bob and Jon decided to incorporate Mali’s name into the name, and “Bits and Pieces” was born.
And that my friends is not how Bits & Pieces began.
Can you guys do any better?
