moon traveller herald

i. The tattered artificer had his way would build a honey comb shrine with words like bees becoming light spectral casting on the cave wall. ii. My brother sat versus Seamus Heaney on a plane to Ireland My son and I saw him on the lecture stage at Harvard We tracked and traced him But never met him at The Field. Had pints anyway you take what you can Along the way. iii. Seamus cadged a stone from my ear and it in his palm displayed He dropped the ink in the water boys and poked you with a poem you know the stuff jumped off the page. iv. There was "this woman who sat for years in a wheelchair, looking straight ahead" and it evinced a neighbor walking to worship o'er. Betty in rouge She'd trudged gingerly to Saturday 4oclock mass old brown coat forwardly she was leaning toward praying. vi. There was 'Blessed be down to earth! Blessed be highs!" that popped my pa again into my poor boy's cra...

For Seamus Heaney The old scarfed bohemian house wives the 6 o'clock morning mass dark and 20 below dad drove me - the altar to serve The slightly sour smell of wine pored carefully into chalices "The patted lips" of the priest much marble and gold and I lived in mystery.                 -Jack Vaughan, Sept. 2013

A couple of months ago I set a Google alert on the term "one honest man" and finally hit paydirt. http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/News-of-the-Day-From-Across-the-Nation-September-4819500.php

The key to finding Apollo 11 landing is first to identify the Sea of Crisium. Which as an outlier, is somewhat identifiable. Next to that is the Sea of Tranquility. So that is a start. http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/vphase.html http://ottawa-rasc.ca/wiki/images/thumb/4/44/Hanmer-Article-MoonHigh-moon15.jpg/400px-Hanmer-Article-MoonHigh-moon15.jpg

Go ahead, make my day, click!

I was at the Plaza Hotel in a suite waiting to interview Bob Miller who then headed MIPS Computers. Late 1980s, I guess. It was a big press event, with follow up one-on-ones. It seems funny today but, at the time, the MIPS chip was a potential power house semiconductor world changer. This was its release. It was built on architecture of the great John "RISC" Hennessy, and a seeming challenge to Intel.  Microsoft was porting Windows/NT to it. Big time stuff.  It's inapt for me to say Miller had class, but as I saw it, he had it. He could be jovial. He'd been at Data General, and was a figure in "the Soul of A New Machine" which was myth in that day.  He's at the Plaza, relaxes a bit after the formal public event.. There's a Wall Street Journal. The guys are passing it around. One was Chet Silvestri, the guy I wanted to talk with, a major microprocessor designer. The WSJ lead was a story on John Towers, a former senator who'd been as powerf...

I just read a white paper on "influence". "The Influence Landscape" is not a bad digest of the trend that sees some big changes underway in the machinery of publicity, most due to the increasingly dominant channel of communication called 'The World Wide Web."Something's insightful here – something's banal. Something's here reasonable – some not. Some I agree with – some not.  Kind of par for the course. But the baseline is: Media is about influence. And the channels of influence are shifting. Digital media provide the mechanism for better measure, maybe, of what influence is. The new media certainly has allowed new experts to arise, many of whom the very people that the conventional press previously relied on, who have created new nexi (plural of nexus) for influential communities to arise around. How much does a hot shot rocket star developer care today about being quoted in a magazine? Some, but less than in the past.  Why? Because they have ...

Albert Collins had a long recording career. There are a couple or three of albums that really stick out for me. (bet there is a bunch more). But for me it starts with Truckin …which Mike Brusha had back in 69. (he had more money than the rest of us at the time). Truckin  has a bunch of "Texas" hits (though some may be re recordings) including stuff JGeils redid… Then there was Ice Pickin . When Hubert Sumlin stayed over, he played just one record, over and over, and it was this…Ice Pickin. What a great cover! This won an award! One more….in my pantheon…. With Johnny Copeland and Robert Cray … (both really great too!) was Showdown! Both this and Avalanche were topnotch hits in the blues scene of the day. Then the Kools got him (or maybe Salems), and Albert slipped away. I saw him once. In Eureka Calif on the night Elvis Presley died. Robert Cray Band opened and backed him.  This was before the wireless guitar connections to amps. Albert had an I-don’t-know-...

Keith Richard's biography ("Life", 2010) was a surprising success both in terms of its commercial appeal  and its literary quality. Not quite up there with Dylan's "Chronicles," but not so far off (more honest cause less arty, some would say); i t shows a very intelligent person with a definite perspective on life. What was particularly interesting to me was Keith Richards' commentary on music. Some people would fault him as a mercenary or popularizer of the blues. I think "Life" shows he was and is a true blues scholar, who took on a life-long thoughtful engineering study of blues as music and feeling. Heartbreak Hotel on Radio Luxembourg is sort of the beginning. The first rock 'n roll he ever heard. It sounded totally different, "bare, right to the roots that you had a feeling were there but hadn't  yet heard." He heard it compared to highly orchestrated musics of the day. Haunting Heartbreak Hotel came up through silen...

Reading about the future I am. Specifically 'Who Owns the Future?' by Jaron Lanier. He in recent years arose lion like from virtual reality in the belly of the technology machine and stopped by god to wonder what this technology stuff means. As this 'Smarter Planet' hurdles onward, his manifestos are prescient.   He discerningly depicts the modern Web taking its users and turning them into "small elements in a bigger information machine". This bigger information subsumed  great blocks of the former Madison Avenue, and in Google it reaches epitome. (Does Lanier know this terrain? Yes, he sold a company to Google ).  Where Lanier is especially onto something is in his dogged insistence that humans give meaning to the technology, not the other way around. He doesn’t even like you to use the term technology unless you first place it in the specific human context, as I saw on a CSPAN book show he recently did. Technology – and be sure the perfume ...