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When I was in college I had a friend whose mother was Puerto Rican. She rather proudly announced that for his sister’s graduation, she had purchased a beautiful shit cake.

I spent a considerable amount of time diving in French Polynesia taking pictures of sharks and mantas. The Polynesian language is totally about inflection. One of the locals told me that, depending on pronunciation, the same sentence could tell a woman that she was a beautiful girl, a pig, or a...

That was just beautifully played.

That I would have paid money to watch.

For me it’s generally one of three: Yo-yo Ma doing the Bach solo cello suites, the Allman Brothers Live at the Filmore, or anything Bowie. Zappa is not good for wiring, trust me.

So the literal translation of ‘banzai’ is something like ‘live 10,000 years’. The word has been associated, largely through American film, to be either the cry of warriors beginning an impossible attack, or kamikaze pilots diving to their certain death. In either case, the implication is a...

You and me both.

I wish Charlize Theron was my cleaning lady, too, but that ain’t gonna happen.

Or people who insist on using Japanese words to show how hip they are….like sashi-eda, when they could just use feature branch. We could also short-cut to simpler expressions like ‘slanting’, or ‘informal upright’.

I’ll add another…people who name drop the artists they’ve worked with….like Mauro, or Suthin, or Peter Tea, or Bjorn, or Ryan—as if they’re on the artist’s speed dial and lifetime besties.

Our club has had a longstanding practice of not identifying members by their full last name [just an initial] in newsletters and emails for anonymity, and the shared understanding is that you never assign a value to a tree. Our fear is not so much the professional thief [let’s face it, no one...

Oh, no, my observations are entirely local. 😀

Are there things other bonsai folk say or do that just make you want to scream? I’ll start with two. “Crepe” is a fabric or a paper. “Crape” is a myrtle. Natal plum is not pronounced “NAY-tul”, like a word referring to birth. It’s “nah-TAHL”, as in the part of South Africa to which the tree...

My toolbox contains a small bottle of Gorilla Glue with a brush applicator in the cap. Many times I’ve used it to repair a cracked branch, either through a failure of my technique or damage during transport. As long as the cambium remains mostly intact, I’ve had a high degree of successful...

BTW, being a longtime guitarist of a certain age, the title of the thread made me think of Randy California.

That looks GREAT! It’s a hell of a lot more “bonsai” than mine will ever be. Excellent taper from that massive base, great branch progression, and nice apex. Mine had only one blossom year before last, then last year it had 31. This year about twenty, they all bloomed within four days of each...

Yuki Shoseki.

There should be no “z” in her last name—she’s Japanese, not Polish. 😏

4.75” round by Yuuki Shosezki.

In 2004 I had a Canadian luthier named Julian Tubb build me a dobro from Sapele, at the time also sold as African [or Nigerian] ribbon mahogany. The thing is a tone cannon, precisely because of the density and the uniformity of the grain. When I had an acoustic band, my sound tech hated it...

According to Bonsai Empire, Kobayashi has two trees that are 800 years old. If I remember correctly he was the one who paid 800 grand for a tree, because it came with scrolls and books documenting its eight centuries of continuous training.

To be precise, both are non-clonal trees.

I know there is a bristlecone pine in California that has been credited as the oldest living thing on Earth, at 4,855 years. It’s currently being challenged by a Peruvian cypress in Chile, estimated to be 5,500 years old. ‘Estimated’ because its trunk is twelve meters in diameter, and there is...

Numerous Polaroids, too.