Tag: “Bob”

Cult of the Hidden Joke.

Our Own Little “Zone”

IF YOU WERE CONSIDERED A teenage weirdo in the late 1970s/early 1980s in Northern California’s suburban Diablo Valley, you could always find a place on Friday nights at an independent cinema-house in Walnut Creek, gathering with others of your tribe…

First Graf: Fringes of Reason

REMEMBER THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOGS? Mostly subtitled “Access to Tools,” they were popular mainstays of the late 1960s-1970s’ DIY culture, spanning a variety of subjects from computers to home gardens. One of them, 1989’s Fringes of Reason: A Field Guide…

Aside

WHAT THE HUMANS DIDN’T REALIZE was that, for everyone else in the galaxy, it was largely considered bad form, and even bad luck, to visit planets settled by intelligent apes. (You’d think the quality of their UFO sightings would be a tip-off.)

Deadline: 2036

ONE THING I MISS ABOUT the pre-21st-century days is the sense of humanity plunging headlong toward some destination. These days, that collective goal seems hellbound and handbasket-wrapped. But in the days and years leading up to 1/1/2000, the Great Rollover,…

Generational Drift

BY OUR BEST CALCULATIONS, HISTORY began in Sumer when people first started writing things down (there are some examples of probable earlier scripts, but no one’s translated them yet). This would be about 6,000 years ago. Let’s assume twenty-five years…

Taste of Fame

HOW MUCH OF THEIR OWN flavors do, or can, Ben & Jerry’s’ honorees eat? Is there a celebrity discount? Free ice-cream for a lifetime, as long as you eat your own flavor? At what point do you just feed it…