NEW


YOU CAN ORDER MY BOOK
WHO SHOT THE WATER BUFFALO?
NOW AT A DISCOUNT RATE.

$10. Free shipping in U.S.

   NOW! PAY WITH CREDIT CARD THROUGH PAYPAL

                    CLINK ON: WHO SHOT THE WATER BUFFALO

 Then, click on Shop Now on the blue banner at the top of the page

        
Or email your order to:

kapn@skypilotclub.com

Or send cash, check, or money order to:

Ken Babbs
81774 Lost Creek Road
Dexter OR 97431

All books signed. Say if you want a special inscription.

Thanks.





       ______
   _/        | 
  |_  FURTHER _|
       O        O
on facebook as Ken Babbs
on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/therealkapnken

audio files on: Soundcloud


FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED BEFORE THIS, CLICK ON

OLDPAGES 64



                                                       FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2017

DO YOU SUFFER FROM TRISKADAEKAPHOBIA?


If so, then come to first, The Lighthouse Tavern on Route 30 west of Portland, Oregon, where
I will be appearing from four to six pm selling and signing my book, Who Shot The Water
Buffalo at the all time bargain price of ten dollars each, all books signed and inscribed and maybe
a sketch. This is the first stop on the evening's activities which are all about taking the scare out
of triskadaekaphobia.



After leaving the Lighthouse, the next stop is Sauvie Island a few miles down the road, where
I'll be standing in with Eli Babb's band, Lost Creek, doing the right rite to take down
Triskadaekaphobia, which of course is the fear of the number 13.






                                                        SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER17, 2017
       KEN KESEY'S BIRTHDAY
   
                                           He would have been 82



Here's an excerpt from a letter Kesey wrote me in July 1960 when he had first gotten his job working
as an aide at the VA hospital in Menlo Park, California:

            Can you believe it? Working full time for the first time in two years! The depths to which I have sunk are indiscernible.

            Right now – or from 7:30 to 4 – we are completing the four weeks of training at the hospital, with discarded texts and
disregarded nurses. The first two weeks were spent on what is called the circle wards, or the better wards, wards where the
men have enough marbles left to choose up sides and play the game, but these last two weeks we are being subjected to the
vegetables, the geriatrics, the organs eating and organs shitting and pissing and moaning and coming on in religious tongues,
creatures that need spooned puree and peplum, infants growing backwards, away from civilization and rationalization, back
to complete dependence, to darkness, the womb, the seed…

            Around the day room. All twisted out of shape by so many years. Ellis: with whatever it was that frightened him
absolutely out of his mind, standing right before his aghast eyes, still gaping, horrified, outraged and farting in his fear.
Bewick: his face showing only a gnawed dissatisfaction, gnawed so deeply that he is finally and forever even dissatisfied
with that, and only whimpers tearlessly. Pete: grinning, shaking his happy old head, limping spryly about in his pajamas,
answering only one question; --“Why’d you quit driving the truck, Pete?” “I was ty-urd. Fo’twenny eight years, then I got ty-urd.”

            Like old Buckly, who asserts, or answers when asked: “We had some fun, didn’t we? Sure, we gone have lots of fun.”

            Or old Chartes, whose trigger-question is “How is your wife?” and whose screamed answer is “F-f-f-uh thuh wife! F-f-f-k the wife!”

            You get to know them by their bits.




                                                   TUESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2017


  Here's Paul Krassner's piece on his friend, Dick Gregory, who died last week:

Remembering Dick Gregory

By Paul Krassner

 

         I first met Dick Gregory when he asked me to interview him for The Realist in New York. I saw him again
when I was in Chicago. He was performing at the Playboy Club and invited me to his show. Two years p
reviously, Negro comedians performed only in Negro nightclubs, and Gregory was no exception.

But one evening the regular white comic at the Playboy Club got sick, and Gregory took his place. It made
Time
magazine, and he was invited to perform on the Tonight Show, but he declined unless, after doing his stand-up
act, he would be asked to sit down and talk with Jack Paar. The gamble worked, and Gregory became an instant
celebrity, breaking through the color barrier with humor.

Eventually we became friends and fellow demonstrators. Now he was performing at the Playboy Club,
not as a substitute comic but as a star attraction. They had to supply me with a jacket, and a tie that was decorated
all over with bunny symbols. Gregory was already on stage.

“How could Columbus discover America,” he was asking the audience, “when the Indians were already here?

In his dressing room between shows, Gregory took out his wallet and showed me a tattered copy of his favorite
poem, “If,” by Rudyard Kipling. I laughed and he looked offended, until I explained that I was laughing because
it was also my
favorite poem, and “the unforgiving minute” was my favorite poetic phrase.

Gregory visited me on the lower east side of New York. The entire side of one building on that block featured
a fading advertisement for a cleanser personified by the Gold Dust Twins, a pair of little Negro boys. It had originally
been painted right on the bricks.

When he saw it, he said, “They ought to take that whole wall and preserve it in a museum somewhere.”

                                    *    *   *

On a work-vacation in the Florida Keys with Abbie and Anita Hoffman in December in 1967. I followed a
 neighborhood crow down the road, then continued walking to town by myself to use the telephone. First I called
Gregory, since it was his city Chicago that we were planning to invade the presidential convention in the 1968 s
ummer. He told me that he had decided to run for president, and he wanted to know if I thought Bob Dylan would
make a good vice president.

         “Oh, sure, but to tell you the truth, I don't think Dylan would ever get involved in electoral politics.”

         Gregory would end up with assassination researcher Mark Lane as his running mate. Next, I called Jerry
Rubin in New York to arrange for a meeting when we returned.

At our counter-convention we all attended an Unbirthday Party for President Lyndon Johnson at the
oliseum, with Ed Sanders, leader of the Fugs, serving as emcee. The atmosphere was highly emotional.
Dick Gregory recited the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence with incredible fervor. Fists were being
upraised in the audience as he spoke, and I thrust my own fist into the air for the first time.

                                    *   *   *

When my marriage broke up in 1971 I moved to San Francisco and I had my own talk program. Gregory a
nnounced on my show that, until the war in Vietnam was over, he was going to stop eating solid foods. I in turn
announced that, until the war was over, I was going to eat all of Dick Gregory's meals. Actually, my only real

discipline was being silent one day a week.

When my young daughter Holly came out to stay with me that summer, she decided to join me on my silent
day. We communicated with handwritten notes. Holly wrote, Does laughter count?
Since we were making up
he rules as we went along, I answered, Yes, but no tickling
. Naturally she tried to make me laugh, but I held it in –
and got a rush.

         All the energy that normally gets dissipated into the air with laughter seemed to surge through my body instead. I
 decided to stop laughing altogether, just to see what would happen. The more I didn't laugh, the more I found funny.
nd, paying closer attention to others, I refined my appreciation of laughter as another whole language that could often
be more revealing than words. Sometimes I would get a twinge of guilt if I nearly slipped and laughed, and I remembered
what I had always known, that children must be taught
to be serious. When I mentioned my laugh-fast to Dick
Gregory, still on his food-fast, it didn't sound so far-fetched to him.

         That's two things people do out of insecurity,” he said. “Eating and laughing.”

         “Well, what would happen to us if everyone in our audiences realized that?”

         “Brother, we'd go out of business.”

                                             *   *   *

         I was invited to a Christmas party in 1977 by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Gregory was at the party, and Flynt
asked each of us to perform, but first he would take the microphone himself. To my surprise-shock that he wanted
me to publish his magazine beside The Realist
while he traveled around the country to spread his (temporary) born-again Chrisianity.

On Thanksgiving Day, Gregory had been arrested in front of the White House for protesting the lack o
f human rights in South Africa. Larry Flynt had a premonition that there would be an assassination attempt on Gregory.
Flynt contacted him a couple of weeks later, and they became friends. Gregory was now staying at Flynt's mansion
in Columbus, helping him change to a vegetarian diet. Flynt had already taken off forty pounds. On the day before
he Christmas party, Gregory was in the middle of giving himself an enema when Flynt walked in.

         According to Gregory, “Larry said, ‘Let me tell you about this fantastic guy I've got comin' out, and I don't know
what I'm gonna do yet but I just wanna talk with him.’ And I said, ‘Well, who is it?’ He said, ‘Paul Krassner.’ And I
just fell out, and said, ‘Are you serious? He's one of the hippest minds in the whole world.’ Then he came back and
said, ‘How long you been knowin' him?’ and I told him, ‘All through the sixties,’ you know. And I said it was a fantastic idea.”

         For the New Year Flynt flew Gregory and me to the Bahamas. Gregory was in the kitchen, diligently preparing
a health drink for Flynt – this must have been the birth of his Bahamian Diet powder – and he was also feeding unfiltered
conspiracy theories to his eager student.

At midnight, we all went out on the dock and stood in a misty drizzle as Gregory uttered truly eloquent prayers
for each of us. When he finished, Flynt’s wife Althea whined, like Lucy in the Peanuts
strip, “My hair's getting all wet.”
It was her way of saying “Amen.”

         On New Year's Day, we were sitting in the sand, just relaxing. Flynt had bought a paperback novel by Gore
Vidal in the hotel store, but first he was reading the Sunday New York Times
and worrying about the implications of
juries with only six members. A moment later he was rubbing suntan lotion on my back.

         “I'll bet Hugh Hefner never did this for you,” he said.                                         

         Larry Flynt had been traveling around a lot, but he happened to be back in L.A. at the same time that my friend
LSD guru Ram Dass was visiting, so I had the unique pleasure of introducing them. Larry, Althea, Ram Dass
and I went to a health-food restaurant, where we discovered that we shared something in common: we were all
practicing celibacy – Larry at the suggestion of Dick Gregory, Althea by extension, Ram Dass for spiritual purposes,
and me just for the sheer perversity of it.

         When Larry got shot down south by a racist nut because Hustler had a black naked model, Althea had
transformed the Coca-Cola Suite at Emory University Hospital into her office, where she was now studying t
he slides of the irreverent “Jesus and the Adulteress” feature. Dick Gregory was there, and he said, “This scares me
.”
He was concerned about reaction in the Bible Belt, notwithstanding the fact that Hustler's
research department had
already made certain that the text followed the Bible.

And now Althea was checking for any sexism that might have slipped past the male editors’ limited consciousness.
The spread was already in page forms, but not yet collated into the magazine, and there was still a gnawing dilemma
about whether or not to publish it.

         The marketing people were aghast at the possibility that wholesalers would refuse to distribute an issue of the
magazine with such a blatantly blasphemous feature. Althea and I voted to publish. Gregory and editor Bruce
David voted not to publish. “I’m against it,” he said, “because this is an issue that just simply will not be distributed.”

         Faced with this crucial decision, Althea made her choice on the basis of pure whimsicality. She noticed a
pair of pigeons on the window ledge. One of them was waddling toward the other. “All right,” she said, “if that
dove walks over and pecks the other
dove, then we will publish this.” The pigeon continued strutting along the
window ledge, but it stopped short and didn’t peck the other pigeon, so publication of “Jesus and the Adulteress”
 was postponed indefinitely.

         Of course Dick Gregory continued to spread his diligent activism until he died. He was a loss to me,
and to this country and around the world, but his powerful inspiration remains.

                                         

 


 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 8, 2017


Old friend, Greg Webb, from New York state, atended the Santana concert at Bethel NY, site of Woodstock,
the other night. Here's his report:

I arrived in the Bethel lots around 7:30... just in perfect time to get through the gates and near my seat. I'd bought a seat in the
Handicapped zone, a band of seats sort of in a balcony towards the back of the indoor seating ... I'd been feeling sort of guilty
about that... but when I got there it was no problem; there were numerous empty seats in that section so I wasn't shoving anyone
out. Cool! A beautiful view of the stage... the moon was out clear as a bell, one night short of Full, and the place was packed.
A mix of ages... but mostly what I would call the Graying Hip... people in their 50's and 60's.. all fairly energetic.

A great, great show. Carlos is about, what, 71, and he is just plain SHARP. Where many older acts depend on back-up players
and singers (like the Stones nowadays), Carlos is out there Front & Center, and man, he LEANS on it. Very tight, complex rhythms,
two drummers (one, his wife, Cindy, a 5'2" powerhouse), a conga player, bass, keys (Dave Matthews guest appearance), and a
rhythm guitarist... and they WORKED HARD. Heavy Latin sounds of many kinds mixed in... Afro-Cuban, Salsa, Meringue..
tightly woven and loud. Just spectacular. I was.. lightly tuned...had some old quality paper I'd been saving for the right moment...
and so, I was THERE, baby! 1969, August! Santana felt that vibe too...and verbalized it, ("this is a sacred moment!").. all too
obvious for everyone that we all were experiencing a slice of the Original, come back to the Scene of the Crime to continue the
jam. Dense, dense rhythms ... multi-level stuff.. he's a real Pro, and plays from the heart. He stopped a couple of times to preach
a little hippie Love and Compassion, but stayed away from Politics (thank you), except a light jab at "the idiot running things
right now". But his message was "higher power... magnificence, excellence and grace..".. that sort of thing.
And he PRODUCED it!

They played about twenty songs, including hits like, Jingo, Oye Como Va, Black magic Woman, Smooth, and a few covers such
as Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground and Coltrane's, A Love Supreme. Toward the end of the show we got a blistering Soul Sacrifice,
and man! If you hadn't been sure that you were back on that hallowed ground BEFORE... you sure knew it by then! I've been to
Bethel Woods numerous times, (as well as reunions on the original site, 200 yards away, and the annual Yasgur's Farm mud-fests)...
but THAT was as probably as close as I'll ever come to the original Woodstock vibe. AUTHENTIC.

Sloooow traffic leaving the place...standard for Bethel Woods, the only real drawback to the venue, and I guess that's a leftover
from the original event. At the intersection at 17B, stopped for traffic and a flat-brimmed NY State Trooper comes walking at
me, starts yelling at me. Wha??

"Are you with those OTHER GUYS?" he hollerd.
Huh? I've got healf a headful... not in a mood to deal with TROOPERS...
"YEah those other motorcycles! You in that group?"
"Ahhh.. Nossir! No groups for me!"
He smiled.. "Oh! So you're an INDIVIDUAL biker!"
"Yes! that's me, Sir! Individual! No truckin with those OTHER types!" as the strobe lights flashed all over me. I got the hell out of there.





FRIDAY, AUGUST 4, 2017

The pump went out, temperature 104 degrees, had a sprinkler on the roof to help cool the house. Called
Rainbow Pump, who put the original submersible pump in. 1972. Come to think of it, that pump blew
out, too. 1988. John and Matt came in the big truck to replace the blown pump. Ended up replacing the
pump and the motor and the pipe, everything new, no more steel pipe in the well, PVC plastic. The steel
rusts and will break. Not the plastic. Hard to believe. Good for fifty years, so they said. I don't have to
worry about that.

 

                           Truck arrives, raise the boom.                                                                   Matt and John open the tool box.

   

                       Old pump and motor come out.                     New pump and motor, wrong one, have to go get the right one.        John hooks new pipe to the new motor and pump.

 

Everything together, lower into the well.                                 Final attachment. From well into the pipe into the pumphouse to the tank.

SUCCESS. WATER FLOWS AGAIN, ALL DONE IN ONE LONG DAY.


SATURDAY, JULY 29, 2017

Old pal, both in years known, and ages, too, Marine Corps helicopter pilot in the same squadron as
me, got a great writeup in the Greeley, Colorado newspaper:

VIETNAM MARINE CORPS HELICOPTER BEING RESTORED

                                               GREELEY TRIBUNE JULY18 2017

For more information on the progress of this project, go to http://www.shuflyflightassn.org

The bodies of two old helicopters lay uncovered on Bob Fritzler's property. They tower over him as he
]walks by them on his way to his large garage.

He had to use a giant trailer to haul them out to his farm with his truck. He imagined it felt a lot like
driving a semi. He doesn't worry much about what the weather might do to the old birds outside.
He's just using them for parts.

Fritzler's real treasure sits in that large garage on his land near Keenesburg. He's working to restore a
U.S. Marine Corps Sikorsky H-34 helicopter, which was flown during Operation SHUFLY during the
Vietnam War. Fritzler said it was one of the first helicopters built to drop off troops in combat.

Back then, Fritzler said, helicopters were a huge game changer for Marines. Pilots could drop soldiers
off anywhere. Before they relied on ships, which required a coast.

Fritzler, now 82, served in the U.S. Marine Corps for 11 years. He flew the helicopter when he was a
pilot. Several other squadrons flew it too. He hopes to fix it up and eventually put it into the Smithsonian
Museum in Washington D.C.

Fritzler went to a Marine reunion a couple years back. There, he met a man from Oklahoma, Gerald Hail,
who restored old planes back to flyable conditions. Hail invited him out to fly and Fritzler accepted.
While out there, Fritzler noticed the H-34.

"I saw bullet hole patches," Fritzler said. "I knew I could count over 100 bullet holes."

The bird had aged, much of the Marine Green paint had worn down to the aluminum. Fritzler's old
squadron number had been painted over with a different squadron's number, but he still recognized
the helicopter as the one he flew.

"I had a real love affair with it," Fritzler said.

He asked Hail if he could buy it off him so he could restore it. Hail said he'd think about it. About a
month later, Hail called Fritzler and told him he'd donate the helicopter if Fritzler would fix it up.

Fritzler's been working on the restoration project here and there for a couple years. He has experience
fixing up machines. He grew up on a farm in Windsor and spent much of his life making farm equipment
run again. He thinks that made him fairly handy.

But it's a lengthy process. It takes time to track down parts that are no longer in production. He bought
an old blue and white Marine helicopter for the parts. The previous owner had it certified for commercial
use and used it to lift large air conditioning units. Fritzler bought an old Army helicopter too.

"Both of these (helicopters) are pretty complete," Fritzler said. Now he just has to figure out which parts
the H-34 needs and which ones to take from the others.

He's not a teenager anymore either, Fritzler said, so his energy has a limit.

"It didn't take me long to realize I bit off more than I could chew," Fritzler said. "I've had some help
from other guys."

He works on it for a couple hours a day, sometimes more. He's mostly working on deconstructing old
pieces and finding the new ones to replace them.

Sometimes when Fritzler looks back on his life as a pilot, he wonders if he really did all the things he
remembers. It was a long time ago. He did two tours in Vietnam and did some airline flying too. But
his last flight in the cockpit was more than 20 years ago.

"I still love to fly," Frizler said.

He might not be able to pilot planes anymore, but this may be the next best thing.

— Kelly Ragan writes features and covers health for The Greeley Tribune.









SATURDAY, MAY 20, 2017



Skunk number six caught under the house, trap and release across the river and lake,
up in the woods, far from any houses. Bought a concrete mixer at a garage sale
yesterday, now to start putting a solid foundation under the house, enough of the
chicken wire.





  MONDAY, MAY 29, 2017

 MEMORIAL DAY HOLIDAY



When we'd march from the high school down Hopkins Road to the cemetery, band
playing, kids and vets marching, to line up in the cemetery center and listen to taps
and the rifles salute and then to the park for a band concert and lulling talks by city
officials while the boys and girls ran around on the outskirts flirting and being kids.






        SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 2017


Roy Sebern, an abstract expressionist painter, was the one who named the bus,
for on painting day when the bus was being painted by the pranskters, he climbed
up on the hood and painted the name on the sign board. He later gave us
the reason for the name.





you are flier number

Free website hit counter