Depending on how you define these things, I’ve made seven cross-country road trips in these 40 years of life. The first two (my only round trip voyage) occured when I was about eleven or twelve. Family summer vacation: driving from Albuquerque to Maine and back again in a Ford Van with two parents and six [...]
Archive for the ‘Technology’ category
The big blues marble
I first heard about global warming in the early ’80s. It was reported on by a local newscast, probably WPIX. I remember the jolly, post-story wrap up: So New York might be as warm as Florida one day? Wow, that sounds great! To recap our top story: beloved Yankee, Reggie Jackson, was traded to the [...]
Facebook pickles
A friend once described me as “an introvert who needs people,” a classification that goes some way towards explaining my love/hate relationship with the new ways we’ve come to communicate with each other. I hate talking on the phone, so I happily welcomed the spread of email. I got a cell phone in order to [...]
Pixel fiction
When I first got an iPhone, I was thrilled to see the e-books and reading applications available and went a little download happy. All of Shakespeare’s plays? Of course! Any bookshelf without them is barren. Joyce’s Ulysses? Well, why not? Perfect in a pinch . . . you know, for reference. Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker [...]
Boy, 6, drives car to school
On Tuesday, a six-year old boy drove a Ford Taurus ten miles to get to school before crashing into a utility pole. He was unharmed. He was six! He drove ten miles before crashing! He was not wearing a seat belt! How did he not die? How did he not cause a major pile-up? You [...]
Virtual Tours with Rogan’s New Hobby.
Scott Haefner Shows his Stuff This semester I taught an Integrated Learning studio for Otis College of Art and Design. I co-taught the class with Sandra de la Loza, an excellent Chicana artist working here in Los Angeles. We brought a small group of students to Laton, a tiny rural town in the heart of [...]
Gear
A White Bear wrote a few months ago about getting into a bizarre conversation with a random guy at the Russian Baths about why guys are into “gear.” AWB recounts discussing this question with me at the baths, where I “was helpfully explaining something about a masculine desire for control and mastery, possibly out of [...]
Pure magnetic fun
On the continued theme of wholesome fun from the past, I’m postponing murderous fun to focus on the power of magnetism, before I have to pack these games away for several weeks. Long ago, there were people who could have come up with a Nintendo Wii or a Sony X Box, if only the technology [...]
Multimedia: More short reviews
What we’re watching, reading/looking at, watching, and, uh, rejecting: The American Experience, “Walt Whitman” (PBS) Last Thursday night we serendipitously stumbled upon the broadcast of The American Experience episode on Walt Whitman. One commentator noted that “it was as if Whitman had read a want ad’s notice for ‘National Poet’ and signed up.” For me, [...]
My new toy
The first toy I can remember wanting really badly is, of course, one that I never got. This was back in the late ’70s, when the original Battlestar Galactica was my favorite show, Star Wars my favorite movie, and fighting in space with guns was by far the greatest joy imaginable. And so one evening [...]
