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