moon traveller herald

  Why did the band Television call itself television? To me, the singers were bathetic – overly off key, gushy, posing – posing as singers or feeling human beings anyway. So if they were thinking Television is lacking in human feeling, they picked a good name. They were in the punk days * , in New York, where lack of talent was not a show stopper. Was the name an attempt to challenge the dominant medium? To bring it - and all its production values - down from its pedestal? McLuhan called it medium cool. I am not too satisfied with the Internet's answers to these questions. I'd say by the time of the band Televison, TV was a drone - a hissing signal that put nations to sleep. Iggy had previously come up with "She's got a TV eye on me." I guess that is about whatever comes to your mind. Maybe the drone or the stare of TV is what Television was critique-ing...McLuhan focused on the CRT emissions and electromagnetic field effect possible ... and its effect on libido/p...

  The news came in. The great man was dead. Stynlie Herbert, a.k.a. Dr Light Shroud, the host of the local kid’s science show in my old hometown of Torpie, Wis. Shroud, as he let me call him, worked on the A-Bomb. My guess is on the detonator. He worked on radar too, but that I can’t begin to figure. I know math was involved. I got to know him well, as my father hooked me up with several co-hosting stints on the show – Dr Light Shroud’s Atelier. My job was my jaw’s and that was to drop on queue, which was no problem. If I wasnt a guest I was home glued to the tube. 7 am, Saturday morning. Before Eddy Arnold. After the Big Picture, the National Anthem and the dousing of the street lights. He was a great man, but the name Shroud was apt. You could stand next to him, but couldn’t get close to him. Yes, he’d had a lab accident, and a feint glow that acted as a kind of buffer. After World War II – and well before I was born – he’d done the grand tour, raced foreign sports cars in the am...

    When I was a boy at family picnics while moms were making the fixing the boys would to to the car sit at the steering wheel, punch radio buttons, and go in imagination to space. The mnemonic master: Flash Gordon - and his world with Zharkov, Dale, Prince Berrin. Yes, one time we end up in a '30s Hollywood serial. Another time we end up in an Italian futurist artist's atelier. Yet another time in a '60s Lockheed skunkwork's Airstream.

BLUES   |   DRBOPMOG   |   POESY   |   DERACINATION   |   ELECTRONIC BARD SYSTEM Bombe. Important gears in the machine of the history of computing are sometimes connected, sometimes disconnected. The British Government created one of the biggest disconnects by burying its own pioneering World War II work behind curtains of information classification. The Government shielded details of their war time work on the electromechanical Bombe computer and the Bombe-related programmable electronic Colossus* computer far past the time when these systems' underlying mechanisms were well known.  This resulted in a dark veil dropping over much of the work of Alan Turing, who studied at Cambridge and Princeton and who was a tremendously significant figure in Bombe and the ACE stored-program computer. People close to the story were well aware of Turing, however. Turing is the subject of "The Man Who Knew Too Much- Alan Turing...

I was reading about Alan Turing last night, after going to see some good music (Mark Schlack and his John Paine All Stars). I wanted to refer to Claude Shannon, and recalled an obit/appreciation I wrote for ITWorld when he died. It was hard to find... so I am fair using it in great part here just in case and for reference. ... Shannon was born in Petoskey, Mich., and grew up in Gaylord, Mich. He worked as a messenger for Western Union while in Gaylord High School, and attended college at MIT, where he was a member of Tau Beta Pi. Although the algebra of digital binary bits was first uncovered by mathematician George Boole in the mid-19th century, it was Shannon who saw the value of applying that form of logic to electronic communications. As a student of Vannevar Bush's at MIT in the 1930s, he worked on the differential analyzer, perhaps the greatest mechanical (analog) calculator. His paper, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," which led to a l...

Thanks to the WayBack Machine, this was rescued from the Netherweb. Originally appeared on the Proud Truth Electric Web Site Jamboree. Let's go back before 2004.... One thing I may never forget is the first episode of the Flash Gordon serial. Ming the Merciless aims a death ray of some sort at Earth. It is this event that leads Flash to venture into space to counter Ming's death ray. And, pulling from a trove of newsreel footage, the serial directors showed the x-ray results: tidal waves in Samoa, earthquake in China, catastrophe in general. When I feel bad, and feel the world seems in a tangle too, how often we feel it is Ming and his cosmic death ray disrupting our natural order. When president's totter and the car won't start, we wonder if Ming is at work. Clinton's and Wall Street's (not to mention the Mets') August 1998 troubles seemed to a part of a confluence. And we note that on August 27, 1998, according to Stanford and other researchers, w...

Stingray - I remember Dr. Stienle Shroudette would pass us on Main St as I was taken to school in the morning. His Stingray was blue - six lights on behind.  At various times other he owned an Avanti and a Mercedes. His ethos was sporty and precise. He was going to work in the Great Tower of Science.In the morning we’d drive down Main Street. From 3 Mile Drive to Point Blank. Dr Shroudette in his Vette would pass us – the smallest semblance of a wave once - and we would thereafter tail him. Dr Stienle Shroud in his blue Corvette motoring down to the laboratory. Where they tested and researched.  Within the Shroud chemical tower complex, the test tubes were vast, it was a tv studio too, for Shroudette did our town's Saturday morning science show. Inside, Shroud orchestrated a flow of chemical elements. I'd watch the show in my sweatshirt with te Dr Shroudette patch symbol from a brown bottled Elliptictine ersatz drink. I imagined in the array of glass tubing a palace of...

Dispatch was a mental state. Our fathers were most of them from the army, and the navy, and they insisted we handle things with dispatch. Even if they’d manned the home front, they were into assembly, time-and-motion - dispatch. It had different names. Telegraph, bulletin, flash. It had different names, but one beat: staccato. But dispatch was the concept. Dispatch, thy name was news in Molina.  Each day around 4pm a Chevrolet delivery truck would drop off bundled papers next door for Jimmy Tegan, the neighborhood's Moon Traveller Herald newsboy. I could go out and sit with Jimmy on his steps as he would roll out the news. We would talk. He'd try to teach me to roll the newspapers. Like the news, the craft was mysterious to me. I was all thumbs and no brain. The papers were rolled to become missiles, they would go in his orange canvas bag.  He’d go off on his bike, and they lobbed like grenades on the door steps. Over long years, the Derby morning line,...

Largely unknown outside of computer circles, the life of 19th Century British mathematician Charles Babbage has long stood as a tableau of the failed visionary. His Calculating Machines were based on the technologies of the time – hard for him to imagine any others. Steam was to power the machine, and the inner cogs and connections, bearing some resemblance to precedent Pascaline and Jaquard loom, were beyond the capabilities of machining of the era. Babbage's work, which began in the 1830s, did not get off the drawing board because the required precision machine was yet to come, and because the very major effort needed lacked funds. He and his wife, Ada Lovelace tried – of course. Babbage died in 1871, willing his papers to his brother. The automation in the turn of the (19th) century's U.S. Census Bureau effort is often cited as reflective of Babbage's work, which found currency in science and technology via this notebooks. Replicas of some Babbage machinery have been b...

It was a Sunday open air market of music and flea bit items. Caught a good film [DVD] about Maxwell Street in the '60s. It is called "Chicago's Legendary Maxwell Street ... And This Is Free." Very vivid depiction of the Chicago Blues. Of course, now, piano players wasnt on Maxwell Street. Didnt no piano players play in the street. But Robert Nighthawk, Johnnie Young and J.B Hutto [his hand anyway, I think; this is a wild guess - maybe it's Homesick James] appear. Lots of gospel too. Much in the way of Hucksterism. It is not a representation of what the blues would be like in a South Side Club in the '60s or '70s , but it is a more accurate representation than most any blues show you may go to today. I got down there once when it was way past it's prime. Remember this guy who had this giant collection of hub caps on sale. The joke to me in those days was selling so many hub caps. That was a very prominent stolen item back in time. There is a CD accompa...

I have had three dreams of heaven in my life. One was about 1957 inside the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin; it was night; there were shepherds and clouds. Two was around 1975 not so much heaven but the afterlife. I was getting a personal check okay'd at Calumet Market , a small old-style food supermarket in Brigham Circle; Max, who pased the judgment on checks, was Jehovah. IT was very crisp to me. Max was fair, but it was not easy to get him to ok a check. And third was Yankee Stadium, about 1973, when I lived in New York. As Yankee Stadium has had its last game and is scheduled to be demolished - might as well share. It was a simple dream as these always are. I was in center field in Yankee Stadium, either talking with Babe Ruth or looking at his plaque. It was otherworldly. Neverland. I have seen this place. Why did this happen? All I can think is this: When I was a boy we were driving at night - part of a long trip. There was this hospital all lit on a palisade. My ...

Online and mainstream media reports that country crooner Slim Whitman died on his 84th birthday are wrong, the singer told the Times-Union . Whitman said he thinks another musician he's known for years somehow got the wrong message out and it spread from there. Several Web sites attributed it to a posting on The Nashville Tennessean, which pulled the item before it appeared in the paper. The entertainment editor at the newspaper did not want to comment about it. It was Whitman's yodeling rendition of "Indian Love Call" that ultimately repelled Martian invaders during the administration of James Dale [Jack Nicholson] in 1996 . His sound is unearthly - like a human therimin. In keeping with the recent Superbowl motif, we ask you to visit my 2005 HalfTime Dream. Would it were Slim and not Petty in '08.

Everyonce and a while I pull something over from a former blog. Here is such an occassion..bunch of notes on Cyber. Wiener - The efforts of Norbert Wiener’s biographers always will be shadowed by I Am a Mathematician. This, his own biography, is likely to overwhelm other attempts to write his story - He was able as a writer, engaging personally, and he ably perceived threads of significance as he viewed his own life. A fair helping of subdued vanity aside, the threading never seems overstressed. This is important because, on the face of it, Wiener’s work, which ranged from estimations of Brownian motion to artillery shell trajectories and beyond may appear disparate, even topsy-turvy, in the light of history. Wiener’s life was both blessed and vexed by the fact of his prodigiousness, which he handled in greater depth in another autobiographical installment. As much as he finally was to become the iconic image of the absent minded professor, he had a grounding in real life. That, he ...

Waiting for bread on bakery road of dust. Zappa the boy grows up out in the Los Angeles dessert. His buddy is Don Van Vliet . They dream while they are driving the in Don’s father’s bread truck - the one welcomed by the housewives on the dusty bakery road. This is a truck which Don will drive for a while. Zappa is a lonely boy. They are buds and they dream on. Incessantly play R&B. Dwell on things. Imagine a homemade movie, Capt. Beefhart and the Clay People. Zappa is a lonely boy whose father works in the electronics world. The aeronautics world. The Lockheed-Martin-American part of it that world that is at cold war. Move 95, 100, 145 miles at a clip three or four times while zappa is growing. From San Diego to Lancaster, back, and beyond. Like American Graffiti, but more dusty.Zappa is growing so Zappa gets the growing lonely boy in the L.A. dessert blues. And he doesn’t go out for sports. Instead he is about Savoy 78s. The cutting guitar of Johnny Guitar Watson. B...

The printed word can have a magical quality – the right moment, the right wordsmithy, and the word can pop on off the page. There is a way of knowing, among others, a type of cognition that derives from neurons firing piston-like, causing ideas’ flowering like fireworks as the eye scans a story – say about science – say in the New York Times. But there is a way of knowing that derives from hearing the spoken word. It can equal or better the printed word, depending, firing those pretty little brain synapse thingies along another salient. Working in the Internet medium – cant call it the press, but it does have to do with the visual presentation of words, in this case in electronic form – one wonderswhere it is all going. People are farily ready to download stories and listen to them, perhaps as they jog or drive. You wonder if they just don’t like the act of reading. My son reads books, but, by and large, he scans magazines, doesn’t pick up a newspaper, and when he reads mags, he hardly...

I think we will close down the playhouse for the summer. Will write but not post. Have a couple of working posts .. but will put them on RJ-11 and link from here to there if relevant. The image above is burned in my mind. It provided an image for dead air. When I was a kid it would be there when I got up on Saturday. And I'd watch it until programming began [with Farm Report or The Big Picture or Eddy Arnold Show]. Have a story: When I worked on ESD [Digital Design - which included Electronic Imaging] we did a special imaging issue, and, for the cover, sought to depict the "Test pattern Hall of Fame]. There was Betty, the girl from the fascimilie and The Girl with the Hat [ Leena . a Playboy centerfold that the gang at USC found handy when an acme of an image was required]. And there was the Test Pattern Native American Indian... My fellow editors were not familiar with this pattern but agreed we could use it. But finding it was very difficult in 1988. You can...

Mr Wizard [Don Herbert] died. He was 89. Richard Goldstein's obituary in the New York Times pointed out that success in conveying the excitement of science was based on his skill in communicating to kids. Herbert was born in Waconia, Minn., went to La Cross State Teachers College, and started out as Mr Wizard in 1951 on WMAQ-TV in Chicago. His show was on early Saturday mornings. "What really did it for us was the inclusion of a child," Herbert said. The show when it started was just him doing science at the lab table. It was like a lecture. When they cast children talking with him, the show took off. Herbert said ideally they had to be around 11 or 12. "Once they got beyond 13, they became know-it-alls." Mr Wizard helped us fight the Cold War. Respond to Sputnik. During 60s and 70s, about half the applicants to Rockefeller University in New York cited Mr Wizard when asked how they first became interested in science. Of course I remember the joy of ...

There is a poet named Antler who wrote a book called Factory [City Lights #38, 1980]. He was originally from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and, like a lot of folks in that neck of the woods, he worked in factories, in his case a can factory, which I took to be a branch of Continental Can. It was a system of regimentation, oppression, life-sucking and automation. This is not the Andy Warhol Factory. Fact is I used to work in a factory filling Continental cans with wax. They were lidded, maybe with Antler created lids for all I know. Factory, the book, is a helleva screed that paints a true picture of the day of the factory worker in tremendous litany of felt experience. Antler is not too well known, but Antler’s writing was acclaimed by Allen Ginsberg. Here’s a bit. He’s looking at himself in relation to another, probably long time worker, and comparing. Don’t we both know the way to the prong of our alarm in the dark? How long could I work without looking up at the clock? How long ...