Cam

My big brother Cameron Bost has been writing and singing his own songs for years. The name of the song is Soul can’t Breath.  Good stuff please check it out and let me know what you think.  I also added another one of his newer recordings below.  The quality isn’t as great but the song is.

The Ram Song from JMS on Vimeo.

Soul Can’t Breath

Staring Into The Sun

I love you Cam, you are a great brother and friend.  Here is to you!

I have No clue where this came from, if someone does please let me know so I can give them some credit

Kids say the darndest things!

The Raleigh Amphitheater is quite the venue!  With it being only a half a mile form my apartment, make it all the much better.  I recently got to see Widespread Panic there for two nights.  I was a little worried at first because there is a sound ordinance and the show had to start early and end early.  Honestly I thought the sound quality was great as well as the light show.  The Raleigh Amphitheater has a great location in the middle of the city with a pretty impressive building with a shimmering tree that reflects of the windows.  The downside is it is right next to residential areas as well.  That is why the concert had to end early.  But I tell you what, it was kinda nice to get home at a decent hour after good music and dancing.  There are a couple of bars around the venue but a little to red neck for my taste.  Anyway, the Show was awesome and I had not been to one in quite some time so it was well needed and worth it.   Hopefully later I can make an update to this post with some video, but I am still trying to figure out my android and how to tether it.  I know it probably isn’t hard but I have been lazy.   So if you ever get a chance to go the Raleigh Amphitheater I strongly recommend you don’t pass it up.

This past Sunday the neighborhood I live in had a potluck block party for everyone and It is an event that happens every year.  The idea of the even was to bring together neighbors to meet and have some fun.  They booked three great bands (New Orleans Masqueraders, Gods of Harvest,  Milagro Saints )and had plenty of food to eat.  We were asked to bring a dessert or a side dish. I brought good ole’ southern potato salad, and I noticed that there was a wide assortment of types of side dishes, particularly vegan and vegetarian.  It was nice to be able to try the different dishes that I had not seen or had before.  I only wish i would have taken pictures, but i was having too good of a time.  The Boyland Bridge Brew Pub supplied the beer generously and we were able to get cups by donating a small amount of money.  Towards the end of the vent they had a raffle, i didn’t win anything but they had some great prizes that were donated by local sponsors.

I had such a great time and I am so fortunate to have moved into such a nice neighborhood.  I didn’t know anyone when I got there and by the end of the event I had made some friends and met a lot of nice people.

So far i think living in Raleigh will be a ton of fun!

Thanks to everyone who helped put this event together and i look forward to the next event.

Below are a list of sponsors that helped make this event great! Check them out!

The Northgate Group, LLC.
Clancy & Theys Construction Company
City Fabric
Boyland Bridge Brewpub
The Saturday Market
Kellenberger Engineering, Inc.
Peter Rumsey
Deborah Ross
Thomas Crowder
Interactive Playgrounds

So, my friend April came down to to see my new apartment and check out Raleigh.  We went out last night to the Boylan Bridge Brewpub. It wasn’t to crowded cause there was a Ke$ha? concert.  Have no clue who that is but whatever.  The Bar tender was nice (Stephen Emmons) and gave me a bunch of useful information about Raleigh, like apps, late night trolly, and cool bars.  So if you are in the Raleigh area, I strongly suggest checking out the Boyland Bridge Brewpub.

The Man Playing in the Band

Do you know where you were when you heard the news Jerry Garcia passed away?  It was today 16 years ago.  I was at Camp Morehead, where I went every summer, and I was 15 yrs old.   It is hard to believe that at such a young age I was into his music.

He was and is a legend, his music and the memory of his life will live on for many years to come.   Below I have listed just a few posts that honor his memory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Garcia

http://live.drjays.com/index.php/2011/08/09/the-grateful-deads-jerry-garcia-man-myth-legend-missed-by-all-rip/

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/week-in-rock-history-jerry-garcia-dies-20110808

Today marks Bob Dylan’s 70th Birthday. He has been a major player in music for the past five decades.  Here are a few of my favorite Dylan Quotes to celebrate his birthday.

“Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.”

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

“May you grow up to be righteous, may you grow up to be true. May you always know the truth and see the lights surrounding you. May you always be courageous, stand upright and be strong. May you stay forever young.”

One day in 1895, while walking through the Ngoya Forest in Zululand, southern Africa, a botanist with the oh so suitable name of John Medley Wood caught sight of a tree. It sat on a steep slope at the edge of the woods and looked different from the other trees, with its thick multiple trunks and what seemed like a splay of palm fronds on top. From a distance it looked almost like a palm tree, and Dr. Wood — who made his living collecting rare plants he directed a botanical garden in Durban had some of the stems pulled up, removed, and sent one of them to London.That little tree stem was then put in a box and left in the Palm House at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. It sat there, alone, for the next 98 years.

Named E. woodii, in Dr. Wood’s honor, it is a cycad. Cycads are a very old order of tree and it turns out this one, which is still there in London, may be the very last tree of its kind on our planet, the last one to grow up in the wild.

Two hundred million years ago, cycads were everywhere. Cycad forests reached from Greenland to Antarctica (though the continents were not where they are now). Pterodactyls flew through them. Big dinosaurs munched on them. During the Jurassic period, small, stumpy palm-looking trees — the ones you can see in John Sibbick’s painting — made up about 20% of the world’s plants.

Somehow these E. woodii survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs, got through five different ice ages, learned to live with bigger, newer trees, conifers, leaf bearers, then a profusion of fruiting and flowering plants, got pushed into smaller, then even smaller spaces until there were merely tens of thousands, then thousands, then hundreds and then, perhaps, just this one.

The problem is, these trees cannot fertilize themselves. Some plants contain male and female parts on the same individual. Not E. woodii. It is, as the botanists say, dioecious. It needs a mate.

When a cycad is ready to reproduce, it grows a large colorful cone, rich with pollen or seed. It signals its readiness by radiating heat or sending out attractive odors to pollinators, who travel back and forth. Once fertilized, the seed-rich cone is ripped apart by hungry seed carriers (who’ve included over the years, not just birds and insects, but dinosaurs, pterosaurs, bats; these trees have been eaten by just about everybody).

But what if you can’t find a mate? The tree in London (and its clones that are now growing in botanical gardens all over the world) is a male. It can make pollen. But it can’t make the seeds. That requires a female.

Researchers have wandered the Ngoya forest and other woods of Africa, looking for an E. woodii that could pair with the one in London. They haven’t found a single other specimen. They’re still searching. Unless a female exists somewhere, E. woodii will never mate with one of its own. It can be cloned. It can have the occasional fling with a closely related species. Hybrid cycads are sold at plant stores, but those plants aren’t the real deal. The tree that sits in London can’t produce a true offspring. It sits there, the last in its long line, waiting for a companion that may no longer exist.

“Surely this is the most solitary organism in the world,” writes biologist Richard Fortey, “growing older, alone, and fated to have no successors. Nobody knows how long it will live.”

J. R. R. Tolkein, in his The Lord of the Rings series, imagined this situation in a different way. He wrote of a race of “tree spirits,” who could move (slowly), talk (even more slowly because their lifespan was so long, they never had to hurry). He called them “ents” and they too lost their females; their “entwives” had wandered off to a distant, devastated and unreachable place, and now the male ents were unable to mate, and like the last cycad, they were doomed. Unless…(there’s always an “unless…”).

In 1997, the London cycad was moved out of Palm House (it isn’t a palm) and planted in a bed along with other South African plants at Kew Gardens. Seven years later, in 2004, for the first time ever, it produced a bright orange/yellow male cone. It can still do what it has to do.

But it can’t do it alone.

via The Loneliest Plant In The World : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR.