Comet Neowise is fading fast. For the last two weeks, I've been watching Neowise climb higher and higher in the early evening northwestern sky. Neowise was a welcome sight in this shit-storm (2020) year. Gazing at its diffuse tail takes your mind off the Wuhan Coronavirus1 and the global, mostly self-inflicted, economic clusterfuck it caused. … Continue reading Neowise Nostalgia
Category: Nostalgia
Fifty Years of Nauseating Kennedy Nostalgia
It’s been fifty years since Michelle, a fifth grade childhood friend, interrupted me on the playground of Naples elementary and told me that ”President Kennedy has been shot.” The news did not impress me. I naively rooted for Kennedy in the 1960 election. Yes, I was suckered, but I was in the second grade! I … Continue reading Fifty Years of Nauseating Kennedy Nostalgia
Minnie’s Pictures
Minnie E. Raver 1881-1977 While going through my late mother’s pictures I came across a box of my great-grandmother Minnie’s old photographs. When my great-grandmother died in 1977 my grandmother Hazel took her pictures and stuffed them in her Hoarder’s level junk filled basement.1 After Hazel’s death my mother recovered Minnie’s pictures from Hazel’s hoard and … Continue reading Minnie’s Pictures
Yellowstone and Me
My wife in front of the Roosevelt Gate that marks the northern entrance to Yellowstone. The road to Mammoth Hot Springs and the Lamar valley are open during the winter. Most of the park is snowed under. I have moved so often that I am no longer from anywhere, but if asked, one place, Livingston Montana, … Continue reading Yellowstone and Me
More Photographic Waybacking
There are three things I like about funerals: meeting old friends and relatives, unlimited quantities of food and browsing old photographs. A few weeks ago my sister and sister-in-law went through my mother’s closets and found a stash of old photographs that had eluded my frequent attempts to catalog and archive family pictures. I have a … Continue reading More Photographic Waybacking
The Joys of Photographic Waybacking
Remember Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine. Mr Peabody was dog, with a pet boy Sherman, that used his Wayback time travel machine to visit the past. I'm not sure if he ever visited the future; that's a question best left to Rocky and Bullwinkle historians. Well, I have Wayback machines; they're called film and flatbed scanners. I … Continue reading The Joys of Photographic Waybacking
New Conan not as Philosophical as Old Conan
Bad news philosophers, our preeminent social critic, our font of wisdom, our modern Socrates has succumbed to the malignant Hollywood poisons of reality TV, celebrity whoring, financial ennui and hopeless incompetent governance. Given the forces arrayed against our philosopher king only Vegas bookies on crack would favor his chances. I knew all this when I sat down to view … Continue reading New Conan not as Philosophical as Old Conan
It’s all over for Broadcast TV
Human beings are worthless lumps of lazy protoplasm. We only change our bad habits when that bitch --- reality --- forces us to reconsider our wayward ways. In this respect the great recession has been a wonderful teacher. It's sat us down and made us stare at the books. And arithmetic, being what it is, … Continue reading It’s all over for Broadcast TV
Soon we will all be Software Archeologists
One of my pet peeves is the ridiculously short lifetimes of digital media. I remember 9 track mainframe tapes and 5.5 inch floppies: technologies that thrived in an ancient bygone epoch known as the Eighties. Good luck trying to read 9 track tapes or 5.5 inch floppies today! You will have better luck with older … Continue reading Soon we will all be Software Archeologists
Analyze the Data not the Drivel 