The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

I placed my swim trunks on the shower curtain rack in my hotel room’s bathroom and voila: ‘MURICA!

…which is why I went with bacon-themed duct tape.

St. Pete Beach, where Anitra and I got married nearly five months ago, had a little excitement this weekend when an unexploded WWII-era bomb washed ashore and was discovered by beachgoer just before 9 on Sunday morning. Over decades of being submerged in the gulf water, the bomb had accumulated a thick covering of barnacles and looked like a log from a distance. Only after taking a closer look did the beachgoer call the police.

The device was identified as an M122 photo flash bomb. It’s essentially a giant flash bulb used for nighttime aerial photography. If you wanted to get a photo of enemy territory at night back then, you’d drop one of these over the desired area, where it would explode in mid-air and provide enough light — 45 million candlepower — for you to get a decent picture.

M122 flash bomb diagram. Click the diagram to see the bomb’s specifications.

The bomb was found on the beach not far from 22nd Avenue. That’s about two miles south of our wedding venue, the Grand Plaza Hotel and Resort. You can find out more about the location on our wedding site:

The situation was resolved in true chain-of-command fashion:

• Pinellas County Sheriff’s deputies responded to the call, set up a 900-foot “no-go” zone on either side of the beach around the bomb, evacuated a couple dozen nearby homes, and called neighboring Hillsborough County’s bomb squad.
• Hillsborough County’s bomb squad took a look at the bomb and determined it was military ordnance, and called nearby MacDill Air Force base.
• MacDill Air Force base sent their ordnance disposal team to detonate the bomb.

While the area had been cordoned off, the announcement of the the bomb would be detonated brought crowds of spectators:

…and Maria Lowe, mayor of St. Pete Beach came to observe and play MC:

“I hope you’ve had a great day at the beach with a little excitement,” Lowe said to beachgoers with a laugh as she announced a time for the explosion. “I don’t know if I’m going to have the opportunity to do a countdown, so please do not be taken off guard if you hear a large boom.”

The Tampa Bay Times reported:

A little after 5 p.m., a bolt of black and gray smoke burst from the ground, followed by a dull cannon thud and the screeching of seagulls wheeling away from the blast. The crowd yipped and clapped and then, as white smoke was still drifting over the dunes, began to scatter. Beachgoers shook out towels, folded up umbrellas and wheeled coolers up the boardwalks to their cars.

The show was over.

Bill Cosby’s 1971 album, Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs, won a “Best Recording for Children” Grammy Award the following year. Given what we now know about him and drugging women to have sex with them, I see this album in a whole new light.

Anthony Ruttgaizer, who went to high school with me, imagines the Bill Cosby we now know giving advice to kids about drugs, complete with all the vocal Cosby-isms:

“You see, kids… whatcha wanna do is crush up two or three of the ol’ whamma jamma pills and when she’s not looking, you slip’em into her drink, you see. And five minutes later? Time for the flippity-bippity!”

Here’s a track from Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs. It’s so very 1970s and very Cosby all at once — you might want to turn down the volume on your device before playing it. You’ve probably never heard it before, and in the best pusher tradition: Hey man, the first one’s free!

The funny thing is that in the ‘burbs, nobody walks to Walmart or McDonald’s. As that rarest of creatures in the Tampa ‘burbs — someone who rides a bike for more than just exercise, but to run errands — I practically own the sidewalks on all the major “stroads”.

Thanks to Duarte da Silva for the photo!

Yesterday, this image was posted to Facebook:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

That’s Berke Breathed, the artist and writer behind famed 1980s comic strip Bloom County, working on new Bloom County comics on a Wacom tablet-equipped iMac. He captioned the photo with the line: “A return after 25 years. Feels like going home.”

A day later — a couple of hours ago at the time of this writing — this comic appeared on his Facebook feed:

Click the comic strip to see it at full size.

Welcome back, Berke, Opus, Milo, and hopefully the rest of the Bloom County crew. I missed you guys.

First, take the 80s group Culture Club, the folks behind Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?, Time (Clock of the Heart), and Church of the Poison Mind, and whose members have aged remarkably well:

then add the “we thought they were Brits, but they’re American” alt-rock band Book of Love, who had a hit with Boy (I own the 12″ maxi-single) and seemed to always open for Depeche Mode in the early to mid-80s:

Now jump forward a few years and bring in the dance floor crowd-pleasers C + C Music Factory. At this point, this oddball collection of bands is probably making you go hmmm…

…then stay in the same area but take a sharp left turn and bring in My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult (if you saw the film Cool World, you might remember their single, Sex on Wheels):

Next, introduce Marc Almond. Perhaps you haven’t heard of him on his own, but you’ve most certainly heard the synthpop group of which he made one-half: Soft Cell, as in Tainted Love:

And finally, to make sure that the lineup can only get better, add the one and only Howard Jones:

Then gather them together somewhere on Madeira Beach, one of the barrier island cities just off the coast in St. Petersburg, which isn’t all too far away from where I live now…

…and declare it a concert and “unity festival to promote racial, religious and sexual-orientation tolerance.” It happening on Saturday, August 15th at Madeira Beach Park at 3:00 p.m., and tickets run the range of $30 to $179. 

This lineup’s just a little too delightfully oddball to resist. Who wants to catch this with me in the cheap seats?