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The Tonga Hut - Palm Springs - December 2021

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The family spent the second half of our holiday vacation in Palm Springs, staying at the Hotel Zoso, a block off of Palm Canyon Drive, the main drag through old downtown. The Tonga Hut has a nice balcony overlooking the crowded street below; it was a 'nice' noisy atmosphere.  The balcony is very tiki themed and the inside is kitschy, with a few small set-aside rooms with a mid-century feel.  The five of us tried several of the featured cocktails, including: Jungle Jetsetter Mai Tai Gin Rickey Tiki Tavi Shrubs Old Fashioned Kraken The Dole Whip Honi Honi Painkiller

Abe Baker

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Supersonically Rocky

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There are those that argue that 90s rock music was not truly Rock & Roll.  That might be 80% true, but if you look hard enough you find gems like this from Oasis.  This live version of Supersonic combines a heavy beat, amp distortion, great lyrics, and amazing guitar work (both lead and rhythm).  The stage persona of Oasis helps create the mood, definitely, and MTV's sound system must have been amazing for the output to be so heavy but clean.  They should have kept Tony on as the permanent drummer; the best Oasis drummer by far.  It must have been the semi-punk hairdo that put him in bad graces with the rest of the band.  And it didn't help that Noel felt something along the lines of he's not going to be able to drum the new songs (paraphrased).  I especially like the Noel's guitar slide and bends at about the 1:57 mark. For the full effect you really need to listen with good headphones, not your device or computer speakers.

The Elusive Pintail

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It's just another duck, but the Northern Pintail grabbed my attention the minute I first flipped through the Minnesota DNR's Guide to Waterfowl; a handout that I had received along with my first state and federal duck stamps and waterfowl hunting license.  The picture of the male Pintail had a sleek copper-colored head and bright green patches along the backside of it's inner wings, and the long tail and slender build made this duck stand out among the others.  I was thirteen years old and had recently completed by gun safety course, which was in two parts.  The first part, as much as I can remember, was a few classes at the local junior high school, taught by a local DNR member, probably someone's dad.  He, and his younger assistant, wore off-brand jeans and an over-sized camoflaged shirt with many pockets.  That's about as much as I remember about the classroom content, which is to say probably none of the lecture material, except maybe the part about not ...

'Are Your Balls Frozen?'

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...frozen and perfectly round and to a specified dimension - that is a requirement for each snowball used in the Japanese snowball fight competition known as Yukigassen.