John Kay and Steppenwolf

I was looking at the Steppenwolf web site ( http://www.steppenwolf.com/ ) and was saddened to see that John Kay has appearantly decided to retire from music and to stop touring.

2007 was the last year of their big international tour and if you have seen Steppenwolf in recent years you likely knew that John Kay and the band seemed to be everywhere, worldwide, during most of the year. They were certainly popular during Bike Week and other big motorcycle events.

John writes on his web site that he and his wife intend to travel during 2008 and be part of a charitable foundation that they established some years ago.

Kay and the original lineup for Steppenwolf have a really entertaining history incidentally. Kay was born in 1944. His father and mother were German, and Kay's father was killed in the fighting on the Russian front a month before he was born. Kay's mother took the infant John Kay into what would become East Germany and was forced to flee 4 years later as the Communists took over.

Making his way to Canada, John was asked to sing for a new band, The Sparrows, that had included members of another local band called the Mynah Birds. Two of the Mynah Bird members that didn't make the cut to the new band were an AWOL US soldier named Ricky Matthews, who would later change his name to {drum roll here} Rick James, and an underappreciated musician in a non-singing, non-writing role named Neil Young. It's a small world indeed.

Here's wishing John Kay a well-deserved retirement and thanks for some really good memories. And I guess that the moral is that we need to get out there and see our musical giants that inspire us so. 'cause they ain't gonna be around forever.

_________________

--PirateJohn--

http://www.piratejohn.com/

Where did I put those damned reading glasses?

Now that I have slightly passed the half-century point, I have to admit that some aspects of old age are starting to catch up with me. Specifically, I can no longer see as well as I used to.

More to the point, I have gotten to where lately I have had to walk around the office all the time with a pair of cheap reading glasses on my nose. That sucks.

I wear contact lenses and have for years, perhaps over 30 years. My vision can be adjusted to where it’s better than 20/20 at a distance, but it has become difficult to read without reading glasses.

A few years ago an optometrist suggested that I try bifocal contact lenses and I hated them. But today, as I write this, I am reluctantly trying them again and discovering that while my distance vision isn’t as sharp with the bifocal lenses, that I can once again read without reading glasses.

I think that the solution is going to be to get a prescription for both the standard lens and a set of bifocal lens, and change them as conditions require. In other words, my normal lens is going to be the bifocal ones, but when I plan a day (or multiple days) of motorcycling or driving I am going to switch back to the standard lens.

Interestingly enough, the way that the optician does this only one eye, the dominant eye, actually gets a bifocal contact. The other eye, the not-so-dominant one, has to make do with a standard lens.

As I told a friend, the military could send me to Afghanistan. My distance vision is great and I’d make a helluva sniper, if I would just lay off the coffee. The only problem is that I’d need reading glasses to load my rifle. Bummer.

Anyway, this is just another chapter in the “Better Living and Aging Gracefully Thanks to Technology” files. I frankly didn’t realize that bifocal contact lenses were readily available, but they seem to be nothing special these days.

--PirateJohn--
http://pyratejohn.blogspot.com/ (the *NEW* blog)
http://www.PirateJohn.com (my website)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HumourList/ (the infamous joke list)

Enjoy!