moon traveller herald

If your memory serves you well. We were going to meet again and wait. This Wheels on Fire. They used to play it on the radio in Milwaukee. And the all of us got excited about that and wanted to go to the East. Where it was kabloom! The Atlantic water coast. Turning sky things ablaze. Where Dylan had been writing this stuff. Him and Allen Ginsberg. So Jeff and me got a ride - they had ride boards, maps of America, and you’d hook up somehow - ride with a Physics major who ate a lot of candy and who said to us learnedly and secretly ‘in a group orgy whatever feels good: feels good.’ Who knew? We shred a glance and the Physics major eye the road with hands on the Chrysler’s wheel. And he drove us to New York and it was a bright day and then was turning toward outta-work time, and we were going down the subway as a million people were coming at us. Crazy working people! We got lost that night - almost stayed in a shelter - but tore up our Free Clinic passes, and took our chances. We got lo...

Some tremendous old geezers are on tour in the North at present. Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Ray Price. Merle and Willie separately toured with Bob Dylan in the last few years [on the last go-round Bob called on lesser but quite distinguished Texas mortals Jimmie Vaughan and Jr. Brown to open] and it is nice they got idea to tour together and to the inimitable Price, who forged I’d say the Countrypalitan sound, is Texan, like the other boys seeped in Bob Wills, and who now bears a strange resemblance to Walter Cronkite [in a Countrypalitan suit with those odd arrow vector accoutrements.] Asleep at the Wheel did backup! Bob Wills is still the King, the thread, fountain and the source here. To read Ben Ratliff’s NYT music review [A Half-Century of Honky-tonk with a Trove of Hits] of show at Radio City Musci Hall is tob awed by the show one missed and by the great portrayal by Ratcliff. From NYC the show [called Last of the Breed” – let’s hope not] went to the Riverside Theature in ...

John Backus, leader of the original IBM Fortran development team, has died at 82. Fortran is widely held as the first successful high-level computing language. As such, it began the evolution of mainstream software programming away from the realm of machine and assembly coders, allowing a more ‘human-readable’ approach to programming. One of his first jobs at IBM allowed him to work with famed computer scientist Wallace J. Eckert - then director of IBM’s Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory - to compute lunar orbits. Like many other engineering efforts, the drive to create Fortran was at least in part the drive of an individual to eliminate some form of tedious work. In the biography of Backus on the IBM web site he says: “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.” http://www.theserv...

Then I was a smock-suited Jr member of the shroud brigade. Working in the naphtha division I had been into feedback some, certainly I don’t get any feedback from you by the Bird Conquerors. And I loved that music. The chance to finally work for Dr Shroud, the father of full feedback and the inventor of the Weiner mobile, to work even just as a runner in the paint factory, it seemed to begin to fulfill things that I always thought would happen. I was young. It was all fun. The PA speaker would boom out announcements of lectures in Quantitative Concepts in Cybernetic Dynamics. This was lunch in the Mutually Assured Benefits hall, where we would eat under phosphorescent illumination. And I’d note those announcements, as my work pals from Racine Street would frag me with cole slaws, and I would show up at the lectures for free with my girlfriend, Margaret. She was working as a stewardess in the Golden Shroud Dome Ride, was much smarter than me. But she was enjoying the traversal. We’d bant...

On the fourth of July eighteen hundred and six We set sail from the sweet cove of Cork We were sailing away with a cargo of bricks For the grand city hall in New York 'Twas a wonderful craft, she was rigged fore-and-aft And oh, how the wild winds drove her. She'd got several blasts, she'd twenty-seven masts And we called her the Irish Rover. from the shanemacgowan site http://www.shanemacgowan.com/lyrics/irishrover.shtml Last St Pat's Post [and links to previous] http://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2006/03/bottle-of-smoke-excerpt-by-shane.html Poques in Boston Mar 15, 2006 reviewed http://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2006/03/pogues-orpheum-boston-mar-15-2006.html

Our story so far:Shroud Take March 10, 2007 http://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2007/03/shroud-take-march-10-2007.html Shroud talks: Spysmasher..he had the patent on the rheostat. Wire-round variable resistor controlling ovens, heaters and the like. For making bleeder circuits and voltage dividers. You know. But nobody remembers. I am all that’s left. Spysmasher was a monster euchre player. He could play the game of euchre . Which it was not my game. My game was coon can. I watched him with that euchre. Drove a 500-mph Gyrosub . At one point he was brainwashed by The Mask using a Brainograph. A Brainograph was actually conceptually pretty similar to a glass harmonica. Programmed to overthrow U.S. government. Programed to kill. First person he kills: The Mask. Went on a saboteur spree, sister. Not the Spysmasher with the Tommy Gun bursting into warehouses and flying on exploding dynamite barrels. But somebody reversed the process that made him an anarchist. Or he just got over it. B...

Took pic in New Orleans in about 1999. Ran through filter. Was on way to Smith & Wollensky's Steak House, in the evening as the sun went down

People living now think that serials like Spysmasher and Capt. America were fabricated out of whole cloth. But the fact of the business is that you had to be there. From the 1930 through the 1940s and into parts of the 1950s, even, industrial scientists, barnstormers and transient fellows somewhere between lawman and outlaw uncovered new apsectds of chemistry and electronics on a level not seen since. Quasi-secret organizations flourished in the Midwestern parts of the United States, many with the express purpose of forwarding science and art. It’s simply overlooked in the histories today, and why not? Reality is paling as enhancements to the serial heroes come to profligate on the Multimedea. In Europe there were the Mussolini futurists, the left wing Dadaists. But the end of world war 2 things were pretty much down to the Kiwanis and the Elks. But I knew the real heroes of technology. I knew Shroud. Sort of a paramilitaries before I met him [in the days when he led the chemical dept ...

I got this film of my life on Bowen Court in Madison. It starts with Bill driving his orange-yellow well-kept Dodge away after groceries. Leon and Eric drive down the street on cycles like Angels. Leon does a wheelie laughing. Brusha comes out the door acting like Tarzan, posing and posing, always in front of the camera, holding a banana most suggestively. Barb emerges crossing her breast with the banana peel, points ‘thataway’ and a second later we see the old bowlegged surgical-hosed lady waddling down the street. Then its another day, the after our last Bowen Court party, and Jim H. comes out the front door now, Peggy and Greg join him; Greg has the longest –craziest fizzed hair, like a fern in need of re-potting under his Milwaukee Brewer’s hat. Then Mazik and then Paul putting on a busboy’s white jacket. It’s two in the afternoon and he’s obviously just waking up. Bruce, shirtless proud physique coming out with a fried egg on a spatula laughing. Then Brusha again, pointing to the...

“Western man in the middle of the 20th century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dusk.” * The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote these words, which appear in History, Written in the Present Tense. an appreciataion found in Sunday's NYTimes. He's described as the last great public historian..which may be a bit much. But this selection shows a tremendous sweep .. and very well sums up the era I grew up in, and the prose poem that was in the air then. Described in his obit as partisan he was. Maybe that is where the sweep comes from! He was the great intellectual of Kennedy's Camelots. With many buds he fathered American studies. One of the subtexts of this blog has been: Famous people I saw on the street. And Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is one of tho...

Notes: After writing about the bomb, Gerard DeGroot was looking for a more upbeat tale. He undertook then the composition of a book about the 1960s quest to reach the moon. But upbeat gave way as he learned a deeper story about the fortunes made on the space race. And the short-cuts made that cost lives. Prehistory first: The importance of the view of space promulgated by entrepreneurs. Simulated trips to Venus and Mars at Transportation Pavilion at 1939 World’s Fair. The lesson of the failure to turn space into enterprise..Goddard comes off as petty and short on such vision. And not too original. And not a good publicist. Was hurt by poor treatment by press in early going. Did not share ideas with the community of scientists. 'Ended up in something of a void.' Still have to get to that Auburn field [now a golf course] where he first practiced his rocketry. Early Von Braun comes across pretty much like Tom Leher painted him. Being a Nazi was convenient to his doing rocket scien...

I was born on March 9, 1951 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The trial of the Rosenbergs was in its first week and the Fifth Air Force was dropping jellied gasoline, or "napalm," in Korea. Born under such stars, I count myself a Cold Ware baby. Now, tonight, I thinks myself the man who lost his mojo. But I am going to find it, while Donald Rumsfeld..well on his finding his mojo I would not wager. Click on the link to the MP3, and listen in http://pweb.netcom.com/~jvaughan/sound/TheManWhoLostHisMojo.mp3 -MP3 audio

Old St. John Nepomuk, Racine's Bohemian parish, which Irish Jack and brother Mike and Dave M., and others attended, is closing the school. The associated comment feed was pure Web 2.0 - vitrol drove all! I made a comment - I recalled the playground..that seemed to shut down the buzz. It must be art! Deracinated Jack wrote:Lunch. The playground. In winter, chopping at the ice with our shoe heels all recess long. Tackle topper. 8th Grade Boys storming across the iced snow. Early on, comparing lunches. Rich K. with sugar on butter on Wonder Bread. Another guy with butter on Graham Crackers sandwiched. [This was DairyLand!] Wondering if John P. would need two Twinkies today. Ineptly returning Mary G.'s kick ball back, hitting Patty McD by mistake. Dread when Mary says: "Nice Play, Brainzo." http://www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=11138

Good to see Stewart Brand showed up in NYT science pages last week. The founding editor of The Whole Earth Catalog has never been quite the harmonist in the church choir, and there’s no sign that’s changed on reviewing the piece: An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’. What are the heresies here referred to? Well, Brand is ready to accept a renewal in nuclear plant building. I am ready to agree with him: The risk of global warming, and the planet’s inhabitant’s tendencies to want electricity, warmth, and individual mobility at this point mitigate in favor of the certainly risk-encompassing nuclear solution. As a viewer of earth phenomena Brand is non par. Twas Stewart who retrieved the Apollo program from cultural insignificance as he forwarded the conception of the importance of seeing the earth in whole in a photo. I have been largely entertaining and often much influenced by Stewart Brand over 30 years now. Since the day I first saw the Whole Earth Catalog at Dave M.’s....

Are there surprising things to discover. We all no the answer is yes, everyday. Yet consprirasists linger like Wilkes Boothes in the wings saying it can be so and here is a little germ of truth that I will blow on and conjure confusion. Had a discussion about Twin Towers on fire as hijacked planes hit with Jeff Hull. Caused me to revisit some PBS sites, and some overheard conversation with Failure Student Henry Petroski. I caught up with him in Tampa about three weeks after 911..when flying was really spooky..and heard him discuss failures of engineering [his specialty] and remember the [software] engineers around him discusing the recent great conflagaration.... Let's be base: What happened to the towers was not anticipated. Most structural engineers were surprised when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Suprise is always possible as there are always new things to learn. Structural engineers are not dealing with a completely closed systems and they are always learning new th...