THERE IS MUCH VALUE IN friendships – even more so in those that are decades long. In 1986, I began working at the Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire’s fencing booth. Dubbed the privateer ship “Cardiff Rose” (after the Roger McGuinn…
Category: Crit
Examination, interpretation, appreciation.
We’re All Americans, Dammit
I’VE SAID THIS BEFORE, BUT it’s more important now than ever: “I pledge allegiance to the Constitution Of the United States of America And to the ideal on which it stands: One nation of individuals Indivisibly intertwined With liberty, justice,…
Words to Bring Back (or in this case, Forth): “Wonderpiece”
– Definition: n That creation which evokes awe in the beholder. – Used in a sentence: Have you ever heard Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” wonderpiece in its entirety? – Why: Though arguably a mere synonym for “art” (at…
Pithyism #5a
OPPOSABLE THUMBS ARE TO HANDS as language is to brains.
Words to Bring Back: “Quotidian”
– Definition: adj ordinary or everyday, especially when mundane. – Used in a sentence: If you can’t find pleasure in the quotidian, you likely won’t find it anywhere else. – Why: To seize our eyeballs in the current attention economy,…
LAUGH. SEE?”
— J.R. “Bob” Dobbs
Aside
July 4, 1776 – January 20, 2025. Magna dum duravit.
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 a post office far, far away, our mailbox 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,…
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;…