GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

Pepsico began a major promotional campaign in 1975 for Pepsi-Cola, conducting blind taste tests with American soft drink consumers .  The highlight of the TV ads came with the unveiling of the unmarked samples, showing Pepsi to be the favorite and participants expressing a level of astonishment equal to that of the OJ verdict. The "Pepsi Challenge" and the proliferation of new rivals and various spinoffs seemed to contribute to Coca-Cola's 10% decline in market share during the early 1980s.  As a response to this downturn, New Coke launched in 1985 and to this day is considered as a marketing disaster matched only by the 1957 Edsel. With the introduction of New Coke, the original Coca-Cola with its 99 year-old recipe was no longer available in retail outlets.  The New Coke had performed well in taste tests but no one at Coca-Cola Company foresaw the backlash that unravelled.  The company received over forty-thousand written complaints (ten years prior to email)....

  LONG BEACH WOMAN IGNITES AFRICAN TRIBAL WAR  Mugumu, Tanzania - A woman from Long Beach, California is accused by local township officials of triggering violent conflicts between several Tanzanian tribes.  The Mugumu Attorney General told the Times, “There hasn’t been a white woman in Africa that’s drawn this much attention since Sheena, Queen of the Jungle” .  While touring the African bush with friends, Cheryl Carter went missing and was initially thought to have been kidnapped.  The tour group she was with contacted local authorities but search efforts carried out in villages throughout the area came up empty.   Soon after Ms Carter’s disappearance, violent clashes among local tribes began to take place with increasing frequency.  The peaceful relations between the Maasai, Hadzabe, Datoga and Sukuma tribes of the Ngorongoro Conservation area that had flourished for decades, suddenly collapsed.  It never occurred to anyone at first that t...

F.C.Nash & Co 250 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, California. Nash's was a small chain of department stores operating in Southern California for forty years until the flagship store in Pasadena burned to the ground in 1976.  The building was a total loss that soon led to the financial collapse of the total enterprise.    During the 1950's my mother managed the bookstore at Nash's in Pasadena which resulted in my growing up surrounded by lots of books.  At the time I considered looking at photos as less work than reading.  Consequently, I was especially drawn to books with pictures - the more the better.  Nearly all of the photos were black and white.  Color photographs became common in works published in the 1930's.  However, if the book dealt with people or events prior to that, there were few if any color photos to draw on.  The books with the most impactful photographs had me going back to them repeatedly.  Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl...

Museum of Jurassic Technology, upper balcony of beastiary exhibit (photo by Ryan Schude) While watching a documentary on Werner Herzog, I see him walk into the Museum of Jurassic Technology.  I stumbled on to it in the late 80s and am amused to now discover Werner considers it a treasure.  Long before Culver City was converted to a traffic vortex, I made countless visits to Jean and John's place - practically next door neighbors.  It was there in a dimly lit corner that I was first introduced to Zombie ants.   I had passed by the display several times without giving it more than a quick glance.  The display consisted of a glass window through which one could peer into a waste-basket-sized interior that appeared empty, save for a loose collection of yard trimmings. Eventually, curiosity led me back to check out the brief type-written paragraph posted at the base of the viewing window.  As soon as I read something about a carpenter ant I tried to see if ...

The cell phones I get at Walmart don't last long but getting them replaced is always a treat.  Another one gave out on me last week so I drove over to  visit Bogdan, the phone guy at the Walmart in Simi Valley.  He works in the electronics department from 11 am to 7 pm and is a dead ringer for the Romanian-born poet Andrei Codrescu.  His English is perfectly fine but it's delivered with that truncated baltic meter that omits nonessential words and puts some of the remaining words in surprising places.   When I showed up and found him busy with a customer, although there were other people working there, I waited until he was freed up.  When he finished with the other customer, I walked up to him, handed him the phone and said, "It won't hold a charge." Bogdan calmly looked it over, pressed a few buttons and then handed it back to me. He asked, "How long have you had phone?" I said, "A year......maybe less." He said, "Probably battery."...

  An hour from Seattle the ferry entered a maze of densely forested islands  that soon blocked out the horizon.  The islands made for nice scenery but you couldn't avoid feeling disoriented while weaving among them.  When the ferry started out across open water, we had our destination British Columbia as a distant flat strip in front of us and a familiar cityscape to our back.  Now that we were meandering around and about these islands, the direction where we were headed or where we'd come from was anybody's guess.  In addition to there being no landmarks, there was  no way to distinguish between the islands themselves.   We did pass by one island that stood out from the rest.  It was made up of two parallel long narrow islands, both similar in height and dense woods as the rest of the islands.  However, these two were joined at the hip by an isthmus - a flat, barren, low-level land bridge.  It ended up looking like a very larg...

  Construction on the long awaited Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is now under way.  The fully landscaped passage will be 165 feet wide and stretch 210 feet over 10 freeway lanes.  Enthusiasts for the crossing state that "big cats, coyotes, deer, lizards, snakes and other creatures" now tragically marooned in the hills of Agoura will have a safe route to the Santa Monica Mountains and better access to food and potential mates. Might it be that the potential boon to the animal kingdom provided by the crossing has been overstated?  Google Maps says if you travel by way of Kannan Road, it is 17.5 miles from Agoura Hills to the center of the Santa Monica Mountains.  One hopes the snakes and lizards know a shortcut.  As for mountain lions, five have been killed this year trying to cross Southern California freeways. "This wildlife crossing could not have come at a better time," said Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service.  Forg...

George C. Ballas - inventor of the weed eater  (Houston Chronicle) On a blistering hot day in 1971, a ballroom dance instructor named George Ballas sat in his car as it was pulled through a Texas car wash.  The spinning brushes that were battering the windshield wipers caught his attention.  He later claimed this was the inspiration that led to his inventing the weed eater.  His first prototype had fishing line poking through holes of a tin can attached to a lawn edger. The 28 inches of rain that fell on Michael's 4,500 square-foot backyard last winter completely ruled out using George's weed eater.  By late April, the  40-degree slope that rises up behind the house was blanketed with a six-foot high impenetrable thatch  of shrub-like weeds with stalks the size of a baseball bat.   In early May, the annual weed abatement proclamation arrived in Michael's snail mail.  The Los Angeles Fire Department demanded that nothing alive or dead, ex...

Don't make the mistake of thinking that providing a viewing  guide to this series implies that I recommend it.  Rather, consider it a public service intended to mitigate the overwhelming despair that awaits the casual viewer.  Hidden is a BBC production set in Wales featuring a Welsh-speaking cast available on various streaming outlets.  The 20-episode series follows small town, crime-fighting cops Cadi John and Owen Vaughn  (pictured above) in what begins as a who done it? but soon becomes a why am I watching this?     Excepting sadomasochists, there's little chance anyone who settles in to view this will make it past the first 10 minutes.  For those that had the good sense to call it quits, here's what you missed. It turns out Wales is a country attached to the lower left-hand flank of England and small enough to fit inside Cher's basement.  Hidden depicts the land, the weather and the people that live there as catastrophically morose an...