Last year, my 65th birthday coincided with the launch of my Twitterville book. We threw a party at a local airplane museum attended by over 350 people. The next morning, we had 35 people who were actually in the book in our yard for breakfast.

It was the biggest birthday celebration I ever had and it was glorious.

This year, the big event in my life was that I still had it. My birthday was Saturday and I spent most of it working on a writing project. Paula and I had a dinner with 5 friends the previous night.

It was a quiet birthday, one in which I felt grateful more than any other emotion. One hundred days earlier, I underwent triple bypass open heart surgery. The chances of dying in the surgery were very low. The chances of dying if I did not have it, were very high.

I had a personal way to celebrate. I went out and ran about 4.6 miles. I had intended to run 5, but these days I take a more conservative approach and am pretty damned proud I could go so far so soon after such a massive medical procedure.

I got very few cards this year, but scores of people wished my a happy day on social networks. I feel recognized, appreciated and very grateful.

Launching a book on my 65th was extremely cool. Being alive and ambulatory with a small circle of people I love on my 66th is as good as it gets.

My inveterate friend Tom Foremski picked City Lights Bookstore at 6 pm for getting together. It seemed fitting. Tom and I are both writers whose styles and perspectives were shaped in the 60s and City Lights, is the last bastion of the stormy renaissance that is usually called "The Beat Era."

I finished my business in San Francisco earlier than expected. I arrived at City lights at 4:30 with abundant time to kill.  I strolled the shelves of poet-bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti's fabled bookstore. I had read a great many of the books being offered and I had read them long ago.

But I'm not big on nostalgia and after a short while I felt like I had been there and done that as far as City Lights was concerned. I had killed less than half an hour.

I wandered outside and watched the amazing diversity of the neighborhood, clicking a few street scene photos. The neighborhood is like a Coney Island of the mind.  City Lights is sort of a cultural island surrounded by diverse sections of San Francisco. You are just a few footsteps from the Financial District, Chinatown and the restaurants of North Beach.

It also abuts the strip joints and porn shops of San Francisco's small, seamy adult entertainment district. There, just a couple of doors down from a sex toy supermarket I caught a new marquee: The Beat Museum, and I wandered over.

It cost four bucks to get in and what a weird, strange trip it will deliver. If you were on the magic bus of the 60s, its a visit to memory lane. If you were were not, then it educates you that the Beat Generation was a period of enlightenment, a time to explore the hope of peace and tolerance. Yes it was about sex and drugs, but it was so much more than that.

It was a period of art and music, of poetry and challenging conventional truths. It was a period of people bypassing powerful institutions, conventional wisdom and tolerance. It was a time where people exchanged ideas, often with great passion attached to them.

Very quickly, The Beat Museum brings all that back. It looks at the usual nexus of the era: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy and the others, but mostly it spotlights Jack Kerouac, but mostly it talks about Jack Kerouac, author of several groundbreaking books, the best-remembered being On the Road.

Kerouac, was my favorite. His style was fast and contemporary. It sounded at times like the bebop jazz that he loved. You felt like you got to know the people he wrote about because his conversations were so, well, naked.

There are so many ties between the roots of social media and the beat era. Many of the thinkers and technologists who have provided us with the tools were shaped in that era.

It seems to me that we of the social media movement are braided and bonded to those of the Beat Generation. We have a love of innovation. We have hope for a future that provides people greater health and safety. We believe that conversation will reveal much and resolve a few differences. We have a distrust of the all-powerful and the institutional. We reserve the right to question anything.

Kerouac used a manual typewriter and wrote books. If he were alive today, I'm sure he's still write books, but he would use the tools of our time. He would be unquestionably among the most prominent of our bloggers.

The style he pioneered is the style that succeeds the best in the blogosphere, whether you are talking for an enterprise or telling about a traveling adventure.

Yes, Kerouac would have tweeted as well. He probably would also have been prolific with a handheld camera. Kerouac understood, even in writing books, that it's dialog that matters. He captured conversations in his books.

Just think of what he could do with the tools we have today. Just think of the influence he would have on the young minds of today as he had on the young minds of the 60s.

[NOTE--  I recently completed several posts on a 10-day, 2700-mile road trip through California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada.  For transportation, we drove a 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid, loaned to us by Ford Motors in return for my objective review, which follows here.]

I pitched Scott Monty at Ford Motors on a lark. I was planning a summer road trip and wondered if I could review a Ford Fusion Hybrid as I, and my wife, bopped around the US Northwest visiting family and National Parks.

My pitch was that I would write from the perspective of an everyday driver, who handles a car differently than professionals who actually understand cars and how to drive them. My hidden agenda was the hope that I'd get better mileage than my own aging Acura RL has been getting.

Scott liked the idea and put me in touch with Gwen Peake, a digital communications manager who steered me away from the fusion and into a new Escape Hybrid, a four-passenger SUV, which she said would give us more power and a better view of the roadside beauties we were looking for.

I agreed,  figuring Ford would know better than me. They were absolutely right. Overall, my wife Paula and I loved almost everything about the Escape. My 90-year-old mother-in-law who tested the back seat for the first 400 miles of our junket directed me to ditch my Acura and go out and buy one of these immediately.

If this were the time for me to buy a new car, the Escape Hybrid would be a major candidate.

It took us less than 500 miles to get used to both the unique characteristics of the near silent motor and the bigness of the SUV. In fact, the Escape handled pretty much like my four-door sedan. It handled hills and curves well. It had plenty of pick up. It held easily in wind gusts. It was silent, smooth, spacious and solid.

One surprise is that we found it as quiet inside as in my luxury sedan, which would be about twice the price of the $30K hybrid if I bought a new one today. We found the sound system, visibility dashboard gave us everything we would want in a car.

Most of our driving was on open roads. We climbed up as high as 8900 feet in the Rockies and were on lots of sparsely driven back-roads, testing it's performance, which cost me $85 in Eastern Idaho. Our mileage never went below 30 MPH or above 32. We tried regular, medium and high octane gas and both performance and mileage remained the same.

The rear section handled all the luggage three adults needed, leaving the back seat open for human habitation.

There was some slight strain when we tromped the accelerator while climbing the steeper stretches of Rocky Mountain road. The tachometer went above 4000 and we heard sort of a wimpy whiny sound. But I would expect that. The temperature was often above 90. The air thin, the incline sharp and few cars would take those hills without complaining.

Ford has a deal with Microsoft, which puts a Windows into every dashboard. It's called Synch and manages Bluetooth and USB connected devices. It also handles the navigation system. Both Paula and I have used Nav systems before but we could not decipher how to program this one for a destination. We brought it to a Ford dealership where a nice sales lady read pages from the manual. She got it to work once then failed on a second try.

We were also puzzled why playing an iPod through Synch was more confusing than playing music through the iPod. This may have all been user error, but it seemed to us that Synch could be made a lot easier.

This is a new generation of SUV, one that doesn't bother with four-wheel drive. It is probably designed more for the soccer mom/pop than the off-road aficionado.

From what I could make out, the Escape Hybrid fills the bill in every way.

(Old Faithful in the early morning sun. Photos by Shel)

[NOTE:  This is the 6th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  recently completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest.]

I have traveled a good deal.  There is no place that I have seen on earth that compares to Yellowstone National Park for unique and diverse beauty. Like Jackson Hole, I had been to Yellowstone more than 40 years earlier.  While Jackson was less than I had remembered it to be, Yellowstone was a great deal more.

The lakes, waterfalls, forests, geysers, cliffs frosted with gold and red mineral deposits, buffalo, elk, solitude, crowds, meadows and forests, steam-heated swimming holes, there is simply more to see and do, more to drop your jaw down in amazement than anywhere I have ever seen or heard about.

Of course, we had far too little time to see what we wanted to see. We could have spent more than double the time just driving along the two loops seeing the most famous--and crowded--sites. The hope of taking a long hike to get away from people and closer to wildlife just did not come to pass.

I had received some good advice from Shelli Johnson, who I know on Twitter as YellowstoneShel. Shelli is the go-to person on national park visits, where she organizes and leads tours that are more organic than the bus schlep types. We didn't have time to folow most of her tips but she did point us to the Old Faithful Inn and Yellowstone Lake Hotel, the two iconic and historic places to stay.

The two Hotels are decidedly different. Old Faithful Inn  is a magnificent log structure. We watched the geyser from our room, from it's deck and from its front yard. Yellowstone Lake Hotel is built in the style of the rural grand hotels that you find in ew England and upstateNew York.

The views of the lake take your breath away. Both Hotels are designated historic landmarks and we were told that this designation banned wifi and TV. We did not miss them, particularly when sporadic Edge coverage became available briefly on our iPhones.

Both hotels have an historic elegance to them. You can just picture fashionably clad visitors of days gone by, filling the lobbies and dining rooms. Times have changed. There is a buffet in one and in the other we sat next to four bikers who were dressed for the road and guzzled more beer from the bottle than food from their plates.

None of that mattered.

What mattered was what you saw and smelled outside. Our first morning, we strolled the shore of Yellowstone Lake as the sun rose and colors changed by the second. We hopped in our car and drove less than two miles before we his a traffic jam caused by a wild buffalo strolling down the center strip. A short while later, we came across a few score of his friends and felt like we'd been transported back a hundred years.

They snort and roll in dirt. The young bulls constantly challenge each other. I was told that they have bad tempers and are not the smartest of creatures. Most folk were smart enough to maintain a respectful distance.

The places you've heard about are the most visited and are still absolutely worth the view. Places like Artists Lookout seem able to spread crowds out to give visitors some sense of what it must have been like before it became a mecca for tourist buses.

By the end of Yellowstone, I had realized one more thing that happens in the space of 40 years. Yellowstone may not have changed, but I had. All the packing and driving, mapping and moving was beginning to have an eroding effect on us.

We decided to cancel the final leg of our trip, cutting out Mt. Rushmore, the Dakota Badlands and Black Hills. We headed south through Wyoming and picked up highways to drive home over the next three days, stopping only to marvel at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

We got home a few days early, spending much of the first day napping and being thankful we did not have to drive anywhere.

We're grateful for the trip, but if we were to try another roadside adventure, we would visit fewer places and stay longer at each. This was a survey course, and there is a great deal to be enjoyed in the details.

[The road through Grand Teton National Park. Photo by Shel]

[NOTE:  This is the 6th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  recently completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest.]

I had long remembered Jackson Hole, Wyo with fondness and nostalgia.  I last saw it in 1967 and I remembered it as a place where cowboy and ski culture converged. I remembered tall slim, ruddy-faced men wearing Wranglers, boots and Stetsons strolling along casual shop-lined streets. They would touch their hats and smile slightly whenever they passed by fashionably clad ladies.

Mostly, I remembered looking up from the town square and seeing a small community surrounded by views such as you see above, views of majestic snow-capped mountains, part of the Grand Teton range.

When Paula and I returned there a couple of weeks ago, we discovered what several decades does to the memory bank. First off, it is about a 40 mile drive to where I took the above shot. Jackson Hole is surrounded by attractive hills, such as what you see here, but compared with the Teton Mountains, they are molehills.

And the small handfuls of slim cowboys have been replaced by entire squadrons of over-sized tourists who have down-traded from Wranglers to Target sweatsuits.

The cowboy bars are still there, but now they seem more hokey to me than authentic. We spoke to a cowboy at the door of one. It turned out he was a New York City drama student and being a cowpoke was his summer job.

The center of Jackson Hole is not unattractive. But it is overrun. It is the a four-season entry point to winter sports, spring river rafting, dude ranches and the southern entry point to two glorious national parks.

The charm I remembered is still there. You just need to step back a couple of blocks from the shops and Bonanza Buffet type restaurants. Paula and I found Trio American Bistro. We had to wait an hour for a table, and used the time to stroll the town finding such oddities as Ben Franklin on a Park Bench. Then we enjoyed our favorite dining experience of the entire trip. Atmosphere, service and food were all top notch and the price was more than reasonable.

In the morning, we got to walk a few blocks and found ourselves at the edge of a big hill [or small mountain] one with a ski lift that was open for tourists, one that had tourists on horseback straddling it from side-to-side and one that still gave you a sense of beauty and tranquility.

Neither of us much regretted leaving the next day. We drove north and entered Grand Teton National Park, stopping at yet another majestic water body, this one, Jenny Lake. We were told that Jenny Lake is the starting point for a great many spectacular hikes, to places with enticing names such as "Inspiration Point" and "Hidden Falls."

But we pushed on. Our next destination was the frosting on the cake of this trip, Yellowstone National Park.

In Jackson Hole, I discovered that memory can enhance an aging reality. At Yellowstone I would realize that memory also can be dwarfed by the amazing scenic realities of a place as unique and rich as this national park.

[NOTE:  This is the 5th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  recently completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest.]

We were on US Route 20, in the easternmost portion of Idaho. We had left Craters of the Moon and were headed to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We had enjoyed enough scenery and wanted to get to our destination before dark.

The land, still attractive, was becoming less dramatic and the traffic quite sparse. Paula, having become comfortable with the Ford Escape Hybrid SUV, I was assigned to review, had her seat back and was blissfully dozing.

The road was flat and wide and I was curious to see just what this vehicle would do. My foot became heavier on the accelerator. The speedometer crept north of 80, when I came up on the rear bumper of the first car I'd seen in a while.

It was innocuous enough. It looked like a black pickup with one of those enclosures on the back and a rack on the top. Being from out of state, the first three letters of the plate "ISP" meant nothing to me.

I tromped it. By my reading, I was a tad over 90 when I whizzed by the pickup. I pulled back onto my side of the two-lane highway and decelerated. The Ford had done well.

At just that moment, I saw the blinking red/blue lights coming from what I had thought was the rack. I then dawned on me that the plate letters stood for "Idaho State Police." I had been caught cold and without a decent excuse.

In a minute, Officer C. Williams strolled up to my window. He had the friendly smile of gracious victory on his face.

"I didn't think you were going to go for it, but then you did. I got you cold, clocked you at 87." Actually, I had clocked me at 92 but I thought it wise not to correct him.

Officer C Williams stepped back and looked at the Escape. He circled it and examined the Michigan "Manufacturer" plates. He asked me if this was a rental.

I said no, that I was reviewing the car for Ford Motors and that I was on a 3000-mile road trip. "I'm supposed to put this car through it's paces. I thought this was a safe place to see how she could pick up and pass."

He smiled and said he thought it had done well.

"Is this one of those new experimental cars," he asked. I told him no, that the Escape had been around for a while. What was new is that this was a Hybrid. He asked about mileage, which was running at about 32 through Idaho.

Officer C. Williams, looked closely again at the SUV and went back to his car and Paula and I began one of those eternal waits. As he ambled back up to our window, I could see a long piece of paper in his hands and I knew I was screwed.

He had nicely reduced my estimated speed down to 80, which cut my fine in half to $85.

He examined the Escape one more time. "Nice car," he said and turned. "You folks have a nice day."

He followed us all the way to the next town. I set the pace at a loping 65.

I'm wondering. If Officer C. Williams buys an Escape, would Ford Global reimburse me the 85 bucks?

Craters of the Moon, Idaho. Photo by Shel

[NOTE:  This is the 4th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  just completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. The previous installment left off at Shasta Lake and this one picks up a few miles later. ]

From Lake Shasta we drove north past snow-crowned Mount Shasta. At Weed, Calif. we turned off I-5 and onto Route 97. With extremely few exceptions, we would not put wheels onto a highway for another 1200 miles and eight days. This was a wise choice.

On the Interstates you focus is on getting there, there's a sense of urgency. On back roads you focus is on being there's a sense of exploration. We stopped often to read historical markers, soak in magnificent views and enjoy assorted oddities along our way.

Route 97 extends north from Weed all the way to Canada. At an average height of 5000 is a scenic pageant of rivers, mountains, lava beds and forests.

Our biggest stop was at  Crater Lake, the bluest inland water body I've ever viewed. Filling 30 square miles of a collapsed volcano, it's surface is 7000 feet above the ocean and it's deepest point is 1900 feet, making it the deepest in the US.

From their, we continued north another 60 miles to the very pleasant little  city of Klamath Falls. Home of Oregon Tech and with a population of about 20,000, we had nice late-night Taco salads at Hidalgos Mexican Restaurant, then stayed in a safe, clean and affordable Great Western.

We continued north on 97 all the way to Bend where we caught up with Paula's daughter, her husband and two of our grand children for a weekend at Sunriver Resort. The first person to scout around this area was Kit Carson, but that was before it had its own airport, golf course, swimming pools and tennis courts. We got a great deal on a fabulous house that slept five adults and two kids for two nights for less than $1K. We biked, jogged, swam, ate at a great restaurant and on our own deck, enjoyed free in-home wifi and just sat on the rear porch looking at pine trees. I'm not big on resorts usually, but this one gets a top rating in my view for having a great balance between recreation and serenity.

After Sunriver, our goal was to get to the big tomato of our trip, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. We drove a few miles north on 97 to US 20 east, which crosses into Idaho. We had no big plans for Idaho, a state that I know potatoes and HP printers. But we were surprised by its open space unrelenting beauty.

We made an over-night stop in downtown Boise at a Hampton Inn. The rooms were pleasant but the breakfast memorably awful.

In the morning, Highway 20 followed the Interstate for a while, then cut  into sparsely populated land you picture riding on a horse. It's a gently curvy road, part river meadow, rolling hills and some badland with mesa and cathedral rock formations erupting from time-to-time. There were also some large stands of white birch.

This was not an area for cute shops and restaurants. Paula and I had some steak sandwiches and we pulled over at Riley, Idaho. The sign said population 17, but I suspect they were exaggerating. We dined on rickety picnic benches, with a spectacular view blocked slightly by a port-a-johnny that was thankfully downwind.

We drove through the Sawtooth National Forest, the turnoff for the posh Sun Valley resort, abandoned gold mines and the out-of-use Rattlesnake Station, stage coach stop.

Then we went to the moon. Route 20's absolute high point is Craters of the Moon National Monument. I took the photo at the top of this page from one stop on a seven-mile loop. My photos did not capture the eerie sense of this area of eight volcanic disturbances, the most recent being a mere 1500 years ago. The lava fields we saw 800 miles west in Southern Oregon are part of this massive, unfinished area.

It really does feel like you are walking on the moon. Paula and I have seen the lava fields of the Big Island of Hawaii, but for some reason, these felt even more moonlike.

We stayed less than an hour and continued East. At most every stop we felt the pang of wanting to stay longer. We had seen so much and had so much more to see.

Our next stop would be the tourist mecca of Jackson Hole, WY, where I had last visited 43 years earlier. I learned that my memory could move mountains.

[NOTE:  This is the 3rd in a series of off-topic posts. I've just returned from a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. It was part-family oriented, part a visit to some of my best visual memories and in part a review of the new Ford Escape Hybrid, which Ford Motors loaned me for evaluation purposes.]

We began grumpy and came home exhausted. In between, Paula and I had one if the best experiences of our lives. We were gone 10 days, slept in nine different places and got to experience the bigness, the beauty and diversity of the American northwest.

The highlights of the trip were a two-day visit to Sunriver, Ore., a resort in Bend Ore., and visits to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. But the connecting points--the towns and back roads, the little spontaneous explorations were almost equal in interest and discovery.

For some reason our vacations are almost always preceded by about a week of tumult. This one was a record setter. Paula got sick. Her mother, Jean Berman, 91, had an infected leg, which doctors attached to a clumsy medical vacuum machine until a few days prior to our departure. Our younger daughter and her two small children visited us until the day before our departure. For the first time since my heart surgery, I was feeling some chest pains and worrying.

When the tires of the Escape rolled onto our street from our driveway, I was still waiting for Paula to shout out, "wait, I can't do this. I need a rest," but she didn't. We picked up Jean in Fremont and were on the road at 9 a.m. as scheduled.

It was 85 in Fremont at 9 am when we hit the road. By the time we stopped for lunch at the Vacaville In-N-Out Burger, it was 102. We did not yet know that our departure date would be the hottest day of the year in Northern California.

After lunch,  we connected north onto the tedious stretch of I-5 to Redding.  We bickered about unimportant things as we sat in traffic, looking at flat agribiz-owned farmland. The temperature kept rising. This was the most boring stretch we would experience. It was made more difficult by a few serious construction delays.

Redding turned out to be the geographic wormhole. Before it was redundant flatland. After were evergreen forests, pristine lakes and a surprising number of snow capped mountains--always a surprise in 100 degree weather.

The biggest and most breath-taking was Lassen  stands tall and powerful over everything else. We regretted not having time to visit Lassen National Park.

We turned off for the next point of interest. Lake Shasta was our first scheduled stop. We drove through the aging City of Lake Shasta onto Shasta Dam Road. As we drove through the small city, Paula and Jean wondered why there were no people on the streets in mid-afternoon.

Our dashboard said the outside temperature was 105 degrees.

We stopped for a moment to watch a few people swimming and boating and fishing and enjoying a cooler time than we felt in the parking lot. I caught site of a speckled eagle, the first I've ever seen. The fleet-flying, fierce-looking was far too fast for me to catch a photo.

At the dam, we spent a little time at the highly informative visitor center, where we caught our breath and felt our collective moods elevate. We were looking at incredible beauty.

We were on vacation.

[Note. Mount Lassen & the speckled eagles are file photos gleaned from Google images. I took the Shasta Lake & Dam shots.]

Every few days, someone I follow on Twitter complains that everything on Twitter is the "same old, same old..." as my friend CC Chapman put it this morning.

What CC and others tend to forget about Twitter is that each of us creates our own unique stream by the people we choose to follow. They become our newspaper, giving us news, views, commentary and diversion.

Over time our interests change. Our friends change. Our business strategies change. There are people you have followed for years in your stream who have posted nothing in recent times that seems to be of interest or value to you.

It's not that Twitter is getting old and stodgy. The problem is your stream has gone stale. The solution is simple. Dump a whole lot of people you follow ad replace them with new voices, who have new thoughts taking you to new places.

In my view people pay too much attention to who and how many people follow them and far too little attention to who they follow.It's not just the quality, quantity is also a factor.

I am a news junkie and follow many topics. I prefer a thick newspaper and so I follow people all over the world. I find that I can follow 1800 at one time. Keep in mind that all 1800 never post simultaneously, so the content I review is very manageable.

But when I add on more than 1800, it get cumbersome. Like a bad newspaper, I find myself reading too much that is not relevant or amusing to me.

So I start cutting. If someone posts a tweet that just doesn't interest me, I visit their stream and see what they generally are talking about. If it is uninteresting, I simply stop following. It is not personal. It is more like an editor chopping copy from a report who just didn't hit the right news story at the right time.

Now and then, I offend someone. I regret this. But who I follow is important and selfish. It is not an issue of relationships--although it can impact relationships. It is an issue of information and how I can keep Twitter fresh and relevant as time goes on.

On March 6, I wrote a piece seriously challenging the market viability of two products from two extremely successful companies: Google Buzz and the iPad. I was in one of caffeinated states and went so far as to call these two products "ugly puppies."

Absolutely no one disagreed with me on Google Buzz, and now just three months later, the product still exists, but would more appropriately be called "Buzzless."

On the other hand, a great number of people took me on regarding the not-yet-launched iPad. Some, avid lovers of all things Apple got downright angry about my prediction.

It turns out they were right and I was wrong. The iPad is about the most successful new computer product of all times. It has already sold over two million. People who have them love them, people who don't have one want one.

That includes me. I suffer from a deep sense of iPad envy.

So, this is in form of an apology. iPad, I should never have called you an ugly puppy. You are a creature with an unprecedented pedigree and I am sorry if I hurt your feelings.

On the other hand, I was right about Buzz. The folks at Google should keep in mind that buzz is the last thing you hear before you get stung.

And as for me, one out of two isn't all that bad, if you ask me.