July 4, 1776 – January 20, 2025. Magna dum duravit.
Category: Crit
Examination, analysis, appreciation.
Audiomobile
“COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE…” So ran one of the many “found sounds” (today called “samples”) on the pass-around tape collages that were a fringe benefit of membership in the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College in the early-to-mid-1980s. (Accent…
The Zine Scene
A LONG TIME AGO, IN the faraway 1990s, our downtown post-office box was fraught with wonder and excitement. In those cultural Dark Ages of pre-public Internet access, creative folk could communicate through the medium of “zines” – homegrown/amateur magazines, usually…
First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio
PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky. Galileo recorded his…
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick
A Short Course in Flabbergastery
IN HIS EPIC, THREE-VOLUME Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, the astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr., proposes the following metric: Let one astronomical unit (the mean Earth-Sun distance) equal one inch. On that same scale, one light-year, or 63,360 astronomical units, equals one mile;…
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
— Thos. Jefferson
Why Am I Still Here?
BARRING ANY UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, I will celebrate my 62nd birthday tomorrow. Leading me to ask: “How did THAT happen?” As a child of the 1970s and very early ’80s, my gentle nihilism is understandable. It was a period marked by…
5 Thoughts: Lifechangers
0. YOU ARE ON A PATH. Suddenly, something knocks you onto another one. Here are five (of my many) “somethings.” 1. 2001: A space odyssey. At the tender age of six, my mind was blown, by what I could not…
“2001” in 2024
LET’S TAKE IT FROM THE top, shall we? – Earth-orbiting weapons: check. – Commercial spaceflight: check. – “Shirtsleeve” space environments: check. – Seatback videoscreens: check. (Legal pad-sized portable videoscreens: check.) – Spaceflight stewardesses: not to my knowledge. – Zero-G pens:…
Sales Experience Necessary
IT HAS LONG BEEN PROPOSED in some circles that, in order to build a better class of citizens, we need some sort of national-service program along the lines of an in-house Peace Corps or revamped Works Progress Administration. “Give people…
We’re all just raindrops on a windshield.”
— Jerry Seinfeld, to Michael Richards in “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”