gueribo
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SpongeBob SquarePants and Baja
This article in The New Yorker this week...
When SpongeBob SquarePants Was Just a Sketch on a Beach in Baja - by Biddle Duke
Evenings around the campfire in southern Baja, we’d play music, read from manuscripts, tell stories, and talk about what was next in our lives, or
what we hoped would come next.
It was that kind of trip in February of 1994—a group of seven friends of various ages, including my wife, Idoline, and our baby girl, travelling and
camping in four vehicles, a month-long vanishing act into the wild to check in with each other and ourselves. The expedition leaders were Chris and
Jay Speakman. They’d explored Baja in the nineteen-seventies before spending a decade as commercial lobster fishermen in the Cranberry Islands, off
the coast of Maine. I was in between journalism jobs, and my wife and I were in the thick of raising our year-old daughter. Our friend Stephen
Hillenburg had driven down from Los Angeles. His hours not surfing were spent sketching in a little pad he carried with him—shells, sea life,
shipwrecks in the distance. And he would beachcomb, collecting bits of rope and buoys, and extricating desiccated sea life from the scum line. An
unassuming marine biologist with a generous smile who never missed a chance to catch some waves, he’d studied animation at CalArts as a grad
student, and was on a break from his job at Nickelodeon.
We surfed and fished and camped from Ensenada to Todos Santos, east around Baja’s southern tip into the Sea of Cortez . . .
(Click the above link to continue reading.)
[Edited on 12-4-2018 by gueribo]
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David K
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Mood: Have Baja Fever
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What a great story! My kids and I have enjoyed him a lot and now my grandkids do... To read he was born on Baja camping trips will make it even more
fun!
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DanO
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Location: Not far from the Pacific
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RIP Stephen Hillenburg. He was an Orange County kid who went up north to Humboldt State, found success in life, and gave back by donating an
endowment to HSU that they used to build a greenhouse dome where they preserve rare plant species (known to the students as "Sandy's Dome" for the
air-breathing squirrel on the SpongeBob show). An amazing place, and they revere him there.
\"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.\" -- Frank Zappa
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gueribo
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DanO, thanks for sharing. Very cool.
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bajadogs
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La Paz - 2006
Spongebob forever.
[Edited on 12-5-2018 by bajadogs]
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