moon traveller herald

Duplication knew little about the old photo booths of train stations and Woolworths. Young Shroud came upon one, and looked into the glass. “Updike” is a search term on the “Uptick.” He’s hit the bloggers where it hurts – in their sense of being protected from outsiders. Making fun of their foibles and standing up for the old corner bookstore, Updike is a perfect target for counter salvo, and he could care less, though no less than the bloggers care for him and his set. See previous post. You see, Wired’s Kevin Kelly wrote a piece. Kelly wrote “Scan this Book” in the NYTimes Sunday magazine . And, graphically presented as it was with cold ugly darkly lit and pretty decrepit books, dictionaries and thesauri, the really putrid tomes, it was an imposing screed. Take as Kelly’s premise: that the era published books [copies] will end if for the only reason that we now are in the era of digital search technology. That’s it! The new unimpeachable era of Scan this Book. One may ask: What is t...

Recently waxed poetic on the old days ... first days of Visual Basic... last days on SearchVB.com I'd been in the hardware trade press for 10 years when my boss assigned me to cover a Microsoft product rollout in Atlanta. Call it a simple twist of fate. It was 1991. Of course I'd heard of Bill Gates, but he was in the software business, and of just about no interest to us. I must read on, therefore I shall click upon this hyperlink.

The tables are turning, as the Internet user becomes the used. You can find out a lot by looking at statistical patterns of search queries - we know that now due to the massive ad machine known as Google, due to the bits and pieces of NSA doings that occasionally float up from the spysmasher underworld and wash upon the shore. The ‘machine’ is learning. Everyday we feed it our queries. The more its used the better search will get. Meanwhile, I was in Harvard Sq. today for haircut. Coifing my ducktail. Customer at next barber chair is waxing poetic about the number of bookstores in the square. Of course, as I properly ambulated to the barbers’, I window shopped the Grolier, the nation's only all-poetry book store, now under new management [which you might want to put up in big letters, there, new owner], and I stuck my head in the Harvard Bookstore, to eyeball and smell the new books. Funny because a speech making the rounds by John Updike begins with a discourse on the wonder of...

Punk to me will always be the Lucky Cue, 1965. Of Main Street Racine. That pin ball and pool parlor palace of our homed factory town. Black leather jackets, Beatle boots, attitude of indifference.Listen to my punky podcast. Listen on your computer or download to your favorite mobile device. Left click on the links below and the podcast will start running automatically; right click to download the file and listen later. http://pweb.netcom.com/~jvaughan/sound/linkRUmbleEDIT.mp3 Check out the textual opus http://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2006/05/hey-what-about-punk-music.html

I got a NuGrape nice and fine; The rings around the bottle are genuine; I got the ice cold NuGrape; I got the ice cold NuGrape fine; There’s plenty imitations but there’s none like mine; I got the ice cold NuGrape. [Was an MP3 here; removed due to storage issues. Sorry.] The idea that there was a unique mysterious wisdom, or just misterioso, floating around on the foggy marshlands of America – well for my money it goes back to Poe, maybe Irving. But it was out and about outside of literature, in song Americana immemorial no doubt. No matter what I think: this foggy mist of an idea gained a big shot in the arm with Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic in 1997. Marcus looked at Dylan’s genius, and attributed it in big hunks to his reading of ‘The Old, Weird America’ represented in Black and Appalachian folks songs where mean old train firemen drink your blood like wine, the cuckoo warbles as she flies, and you ask a country house wife to surreptitiously make you a pallet on her floor. For m...

Had a chance to see Wanda Jackson last Saturday night with Jake and Mike. She is up in years, but her hair was new, and she just had a young spirit. She is the original Rockabilly Woman Singer of the 1950s. Elivs’ one-time girl friend. A ball of energy in her day, who could probably scare Eddie Cochrane and Gene Vincent if they had to follow her on stage. “Let’s Have a Party” was the big number. It was a rainy night – “monsoon-like” suggested Wanda’s husband, manager and emcee – in Lexington [birthplace of American Revolution] Mass. Wanda’s show was a window back into time, when country performers had a way of old style vaudeville entertainment .. a firm grip on audience patter .. she would joke as she strapped on her [pink] guitar. And tried to tune it in the humidity…one line..she tunes it.. some … “Well, that’s good enough for rocknroll! …” “ I used to tell my band, if we’re out of tune it sounds like more of us.” That’s rocknroll! More Wanda http://www.wandajackson.com/