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Walter Powers of The Lost

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I got sad news last night that a dear Boston friend died at 79. That is Walter Powers, who I came to know through my library circles [I worked at BU Library for almost 10 years- and got to know a bunch of MIT Library people, especially Gordon Thomas, who played the organ at our wedding.] He and Walter did cataloging and had little bands during academic intermissions.   Walter Powers was a real good guy. Also, a musical historian, erudite, movie star good looking, and famous in the Boston music scene. Including the so-called BossTown Sound scene. He had been in - among others - The Lost with Willie Alexander, Listening with Peter Malickand the Grass Menagerie with Doug Yule, who went on to replace John Cale in the Velvet Underground. When Lou Reed left the Velvets, Walter replaced him, and he brought in Willie Alexander when Sterling Morrison went back to college, leaving Mo Tucker the last of the originals. Tough job to replace Lou there, Walter would admit, but honestly,...
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Sunnyland Slim with Capt Beefhart. Boston, 1978

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  Sunnyland Slim with Capt Beefhart. Boston, 1978. Sunnyland liked Beefhart, and they got along well. But Beefhart could hardly sit still or have a (two-sided) conversation then. it seemed like he was up all the time. Slim bought some Johnny Walker and was looking forward to 'sitting down and talking' but Beefhart's wife had to insist he get some sleep at that point. [Paul's Mall, Boston] Slim's got a look here like he is getting ready to go on stage.
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Oh my papa!

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Goodtime Charlies!

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Jellification

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  Jellification  February 27, 2026 By Jack Vaughan  reposted from progressivegauge.com   It’s early to tell whether the recent generation of AI advances will go beyond recommendation engines and fraud detection—the two shining stars of the big data era. The distinction is simple: If I fudge a recommender, I lose a possible sale; if I fail a fraud detection, I lose money I already have. One might categorize the latter as mission critical —that high-stakes idiom from the Space Race days. Whether “nice-to-have” or “need-to-have,” the AI boom has placed immense pressure on the data centers running these LLMs and their supporting agentic systems. After all, current investment plans augur for superscale, 24/7 tokenization across the globe. This raises an increasingly urgent question: How will these data centers ensure continual operation when extreme weather—which we seem to see with increasing frequency—threatens the power supply, cooling systems, and roofing required to...
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TV Phones Are Coming Soon

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This world of the future is not far away, we are assured.+ and it will include portable video phones and self-driving cars. This brought recognition to me. That is because in my own little time-capsule movie, an 8th grade class field trip had allowed me to take part in a video phone call to a girl at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. Later, I told the folks at dinner back home that “TV phones are coming soon.” The family did not buy it. The advice was: “Eat your dinner.” They were right. It wasn’t until one year’s Pandemic-driven adventure in Zoom-A-Rama, that I personally became a regular user of such video communications capabilities. The GM exhibit at that same World’s Fair showed automated highways – a dream still deferred. --- +The Vast of Night  https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2021/09/pandemic-ruminations.html
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Edmund Morris’s Edison

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  Edmund Morris’s Edison Thomas Edison was born in the years before the American Civil War, and as a lad came under the thrall of popular writings on electricity. The phenomenon had only recently evolved from spooky mystery thing to moneymaking entity. In the form of the commercial telegraph was forming the basis for new industries and ways of life in the United States. As a boy in Port Huron, Michigan, he muddled through some schooling, became a news boy, and then a telegraph operator as the Civil War commenced. He used his time. Riding the rail running from Port Huron to Detroit, and he began to produce his own paper in a baggage car on the train. In Detroit between the morning and evening trains he’s go to the Young Men’s Society Reading Room (public library) and commence to read every book, starting at the beginning of book shelf (that’s something I heard, not something detailed as such in the book we’re going to look at here). Read Les Misérables, Robert Burden’s The Anatomy o...
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