moon traveller herald

 He was the Indian of the group, he'd say, quoting Jimmy Carl Black of the Mothers. I remember when we saw J.Geils, who were opening for Ten Years After at Madison Coliseum. After Geils played and Ten Years was on, and We were standing up front and Jim sneaks his long-haired head from just behind the stage curtain. Points to mime come stage left and I will get you inside. Looked very Injun. A scout. And we hung out with the J.Geils Band. Getting arrested by Officer "Hash" Halverson at Cambridge Castle apartment near Brady St. We had the speakers (each as big as a washingmachine and one pointed out the open apt door) listening to Voodoo Child when the Squid arrived. In his wood shop by a turn in the Root River - right in the city but very rural. A strange overgrown patch off Memorial Dr. Showing incredible turned wood working. I think his company was called Dovetail. Discussing fending off varmints with shotgun. Singing deeply 6 Days on the Road, It’s Dark as a Dungeon Way...

I got hearts, ah, in my looney tunes I got dreams and you do, too I got ten-wheel drive To pick you up, up to your ears, oh I got refined carbon in my eyelids cleared I've got no one to love and no one to fear You better walk it And talk it less you lose that beat You better lose yourself mama And knock yourself right off of your feet. -Lou Reed HEY SHERMAN LET'S GO BACK TO APRIL 2024!  

  Acme Oyster House - Circa 1996 [APRIL 4, 2024] - White Panther Party Activist, jazz writer, MC5 band manager and poet John Sinclair, famously and unfairly imprisoned in 1969 for marijuana use, died Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82. His cause, as potently sung in John Lennon’s It Aint Fair John Sinclair [in the stir for breathing air] became an important rally point in the fight to legalize pot. His influence was also important in helping to create a politically radical school of high-powered rock n roll. That notwithstanding, he also diligently promoted a school of writing known as Jazz Poetry. The school could also be called Blues Poetry. In the '80s Sinclair moved to New Orleans, started doing a radio show, and started writing and performing poetry, mostly about blues.  His masterwork Fattening Frogs for Snakes - Delta Sound Suite," took the lives of the 20th Century American blues artists and applied a precisely descriptive and musical poetical form to its representation. Si...

In 1967 my parents took a monthlong tour of Europe, leaving me, my brother and sister with my aunt and uncle in Milton Mass in some pseudo farm and horse country outside of Boston. This was a serious dislocation from my high school friends who I was sure we're having the most wonderful summer ever at North Beach In the day and the Point at night. All I had was records I’d brung along [Happy Jack, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape and Sgt. Peppers(5a)] and a little turntable. That is like: background. One night on tv there was a show about ‘hippies’. They had these guys on, and I would bet they were from the commune that John identified: The True Light Beavers. The joke was one of them had a basketball uniform top on saying “True Light Beavers”. I knew it was a put on. And I liked it. They took their name from the shirt they found at a Goodwill. Are you religious? The moderator asked. Yes, they said. Our religion is called the True Light Bea...

Marvin Minsky on YouTube discusses the history of his work. Minsky [1927-2016] was the founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and a key figure in Artificial Intelligence's early development. He was a central figure in highly nuanced [meaning I don't understand them] academic controversies around nerual nets and symbolic logic. He was initially inspired by reading a book on mathematical biophysics by Nicholas Rashevsky. This book provided mathematical decription of biological functions. [which would as described seem to foretell soon brewing cybernetic theories, I'd add].  He was also moved  by the science fiction of H.G. Wells. He liked sci-fi, he said, because the authors made guesses about the future, and that seems to map to what researchers do. He invited Ray Bradbury to his lab once to view the robotics. Bradbury demurred - he didn't want to see clunky real robots - it would cloud his imagination. Minsky more or less admitted these first-take MIT robots w...

 1. I have been studying Disinformation since Journalism School. More and more the study of disinformation became a specific college study. [One of my professors back in the day, Larry Martin, had a full career as head of Intelligence in Czechkoslovokia during Communist Era. He could tell you how it was done before the Web.] 1.5 Weakly funded in the last two years the Important Cause of Disinformation Study has all been shut down. 2. This is how the Constitution Loving Dictator Works. The Mission: Spread Partisan Propaganda that He approves of. Harass others. 3. How? Set up pop-up groups with Right-Thinking Billionaire Funding capable of heaping subpoenas for emails, text messages, and other information related to government and social media companies. [This post was researched with the help of NYTimes and Bing AI.] 4. Complying with these requests consumed time and money. The threat of legal harassment also led to a decrease in funding from donors, including philanthropies, corpor...

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is right up there with the MidEast, Ukraine, Democracy, Inflation and Kim Kardashian among the memes that we see in our news feeds today. *On Wall Street, AI hopes drove a big boost in the stock market. People are going to lose jobs and machines are going to take over and we can rake in some bucks: Hurray!  *For my brother, it’s a quick “Belated Birthday Card source” [Hell with Hallmark]  *For headline writers, AI fever has been a chance to get clicks, hits and page views based on FUD - Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.  *For an older writer, [me] AI nudges one forward, raining down ideas when his own synapses are flagging .*&%!  I spent over 40 years in the computer trade ‘press’ – as the Web took over it was called ‘media’. I wrote was about what was inside these boxes. The Definition of computer is 1-input, 2-processing, 3-output – all of which is enabled by 4-memory. The last 5 years before I retired I had the Big Data beat. That w...