Jimmy Buffett was the answer to one of the ‘Test Pilot’ questions in the October issue of AOPA Pilot magazine, the magazine of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. Here was the question and answer:

Question 7. From reader Charles Baumann: Less than 10 authors have ever had their books appear on The New York Times bestseller lists for both fiction and nonfiction. Which of these authors is well known as a pilot?

Answer – Jimmy Buffett for his novels, Where is Joe Merchant? (1992) and A Salty Piece of Land (2004). His book A Pirate Looks at Fifty made the nonfiction list in 1998.

Visit our Jimmy and Aviation page to read about Buffett’s pilot career and see photos of his airplanes.

Thursday morning on CNBC, former US congressman Dick Armey mentioned Jimmy Buffett. A BuffettWorld visitor details what was said:

Did you see Dick Armey on CNBC this am? He noted that we are listening to the
wrong Buffett and we should be listening to Jimmy Buffett, not Warren Buffett.
Then he went on to explain why based on a couple lines from Jimmy’s songs. The
CNBC gang asked who gave him the line and verbally assumed he was not a
Parrothead, to which he enthusiastically replied that he was and he knew every
single song line.

(hat tip to Erik for passing this along)

Jimmy Buffett played two shows at the New Morning Club in Paris, France over the weekend. It’s the second year in a row that Buffett has played at the venue. Rolling Stone has an article on the shows:

Over the weekend, Jimmy Buffett helped kick off fashion week in Paris by bringing the Parrothead nation — decked out in grass skirts, coconut bras, Hawaiian shirts and goofy homemade hats — to the city of lights for two shows at the legendary New Morning jazz club. Loyal fans flew in from all over the world for the pair of intimate gigs that reminded Buffett of the “days when this was as large a crowd as we would see.”

Buffett described how he first came to Paris:

Buffett first came to Paris 34 years ago, at the behest of some friends in Key West, Florida, that were working on a film with a French production team. “Paris had been on my song line since I was a kid reading Fitzgerald, Gertrud Stein and Hemingway — I just had to figure out a way to get there,” he says. The movie needed a soundtrack and Buffett wound up spending the summer living in a castle an hour outside of Paris, “learning the language and the bohemian lifestyle.” He has been coming back regularly ever since.

View the set lists from the shows here.

Jimmy Buffett heads to France this week for two shows on Friday and Saturday at the New Morning Club in Paris. The International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times) will be catching up with Jimmy this week for an interview, and you can submit questions of your own that may be chosen to be asked.

Visit Globespotters and leave your question(s) as a comment underneath the article.

View all tour dates here.

On Wednesday night, Jimmy Buffett was at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC to honor his friend, author Herman Wouk:

Jimmy Buffett showed up at the library’s Coolidge Auditorium last night to sing the praises of his old pal — along with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz, New York Times columnist William Safire and Librarian of Congress James Billington, who announced that the new award would bear Wouk’s name.

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it was the sockless Buffett — bounding onstage, he promptly shed his shoes as well — who offered the evening’s most startling change of pace.

“People have asked me for years, ‘How the hell did you and Herman Wouk get together?’ ” Buffett said. Long story short, he’d somehow gotten the idea of turning Wouk’s “Don’t Stop the Carnival” — in which a New York PR guy plays out midlife fantasies on a tropical isle — into a Broadway musical.

So Buffett wrote Wouk a letter. “Who are you?” the author replied. But he eventually signed on, despite the fact that he didn’t know what reggae was. “Don’t Stop the Carnival” ran for a few weeks in Miami in 1997.

“We never made it to Broadway, but the carnival is still happening,” Buffett said. Then he proved it with a medley of songs from their collaboration. Seated onstage, Wouk smiled and mouthed the lyrics.

Read the entire Washington Post article here. Buy Buffett’s album “Dont Stop The Carnival.”

photo: Gerald Martineau / Washington Post