Ahhh ... the tasty tone of the Les Paul Standard. I suppose if I were stuck on a deserted island, this would be the one guitar I'd need to have with me. Oh, and I'd need my Fender Blues Deluxe amp. And a source of electricity.
 
Legions of great players have slung a Les Paul over their shoulders. Jimmy Page. Mike Bloomfield. Billy Gibbons. Peter Green. Dickey Betts. Robert Fripp. And of course Les Paul himself. I like to think I channel the masters whenever I plug mine in. All I know for sure is that this guitar is heavenly, a machine capable of sounds so seductive that I fall more severely under its spell every time I pick it up, or even look at it.

My family managed to escape for the weekend to Cocoa Beach, not one of Florida's most celebrated stretches of coastline but a pretty nice one we've decided (and it's just an hour's drive). We took up residence in an oceanfront hotel, frolicked in the surf, ate pizza and just generally enjoyed each other's company amid unfamiliar surroundings. It was good to get away, if only for a weekend. My wife can speak to this more specifically, but I know the hours at home get excruciatingly long during the summer, when school's out and the kids have decided they're done with toys, crayons, games and so forth. Our beach trip was just what the doctor ordered. Everybody seems contented. For now.

He's been called one of the greatest reporters of the 20th century, and I totally agree.

North Carolina native and Manhattan transplant Joseph Mitchell, whose oddball character portraits and carefully crafted features for The New Yorker are among the best pieces of journalism ever published, would have turned 100 this month. A few of his enduringly appealing books are being reissued to honor the dapper Southern gentlemen, who died in 1996. I've had his collections of stories on my shelves for years and return to them habitually.

Mitchell's gift for lucid narrative and unfussy prose is truly one of America's greatest literary treasures. Read an excerpt of his work at the Random House site. 

You can't walk very far in my house without stepping on a Power Ranger toy. And most of them have pointy little swords and other plastic weapons of painful proportions.

On a per-viewing-hour basis, you could also say that most of our cable bill goes toward the Power Rangers. Today Guitar Dad decides it's high time to interview his 5-year-old boy about one of his favorite topics:

Why do you like Power Rangers? "Because they fight and turn into Megazords."

What is their mission? "To save the day and shoot monsters."

Who is your favorite Power Ranger? "All of 'em, even the ones that haven't been created yet."

When do you watch the Power Rangers? "All night."

What are the most exciting Power Ranger moves? "When they kick and punch and do back flips in the air and front flips in the air."

Anything else you want to add? "They're cool."

When I got the idea of putting my music online so a few buddies could hear the files, I wasn't planning on posting my ramblings in a so-called blog. The reason I started toying with Guitar Dad was because I discovered this free website creator, Weebly, and the product was easy to set up and fun. Even though I write all the flippin' time in my day job, and have for almost 20 years, I apparently can't get enough of it. The blog format inspires little bursts of storytelling and challenges me to find just the right image for my latest entry. It doesn't burn too much of my time and it's a nice creative outlet. To all you family members and friends who've been directed here, and you lucky rascals who've stumbled onto Guitar Dad, thanks for dropping by.

We’re fascinated by the news that Anheuser-Busch, the pride of St. Louis, is getting gobbled up by Belgium-based InBev. It’s a monster deal, valued at $52 billion and considered the largest-ever cash transaction. The combined company will brew about a quarter of the world’s beer, including A-B staples Bud and Michelob as well as InBev’s Stella Artois, Bass and others.

The prickly part is that good old Budweiser will no longer be red, white and blue. Bud’s new hometown is Leuven, Belgium. And another thing: Being in Orlando, we wonder what’s in store for SeaWorld and A-B’s other theme parks, potentially among the “non-core assets” that InBev wants to unload to help fund the acquisition.

Most important of all, what’s the fate of the free beer at SeaWorld’s Anheuser-Busch Hospitality Center? Either the parks get sold and the free beer disappears, or InBev keeps the entertainment division and we get to enjoy complimentary Stella and Bass on our frequent excursions to see Shamu. I’m kind of liking the latter concept. It’s all about the beer, my friends.

Seeing reviews of the new film about Hunter Thompson inspired me to revisit some of the literary legend's most notable works. It goes without saying that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a masterpiece. What kind of masterpiece, I’m not sure, but it’s both brilliant and degenerate and quite distinctively so.

What irritates me sometimes is that Thompson's sordid life story usually gets more attention than his writing does. His words are the real point, right?

“I took the expressway out to the track, driving very fast and jumping the monster car back and forth between lanes, driving with a beer in one hand and my mind so muddled that I almost crushed a Volkswagen full of nuns when I swerved to catch the right exit.”

That’s just a random selection from his 1970 magazine piece The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. This stuff is fun to read and, I suppose, fun to imagine Thompson actually doing.

In his writings and interviews, he gave us a treasure trove of weird wisdom and Twain-like comic perceptions. “Call on God, but row away from the rocks,” is one of his well-remembered quotes. Another: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

I may need to go see that new movie.

Having the house to myself for the next few days means several things. Above all, it means missing my wife and kids profoundly while they visit family out of town. Guitar Dad’s pad is a weirdly quiet place without my boisterous brood running about, demanding this and that, cracking me up and just generally being super cute and fun.

But being alone also means playing some of my favorite tunes on the stereo, loudly and incessantly. I’m talking about the wild, esoteric stuff I usually don’t subject my family to. Stuff like King Crimson, Zappa, creepy pre-Dark Side of the Moon Floyd, Coltrane’s more exploratory ventures and the 13th Floor Elevators, to name a few.

I own a lot of this music on vinyl, which means firing up my trusty Project turntable. LPs really do sound deep and delicious, although I’m using a new software program to digitally dumb down some choice albums for my iPod. Between the loud tunes and my cranked-up guitar amp, I’m hoping to get a grip on my loneliness this week. We’ll see.

One of the most breathtaking places on earth is Big Sur along the rugged central California coast. Over the past few days wildfires have charred some 65,000 acres of the neighboring Los Padres National Forest, and flames have destroyed several homes just a stone's throw from the celebrated Ventana Inn and Spa off Highway 1.

My wife and I are watching the story closely, given that we spent our honeymoon at Ventana back in 1998 and stayed there again a few years later. Keep your fingers crossed for Big Sur.

Web surfing may be making us stupid. Writer Nicholas Carr makes a strong case for this theory in the Atlantic Monthly. Here's his take on why reading the old-fashioned way, not online, is better for our brains.

"The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading ... is indistinguishable from deep thinking."