Category: personal
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Lunacon 2014 (1a): Building Character
Panelists: Mike Flynn and Ken Atlabef. I was a little disappointed to see that the first panel sported Mike Flynn as a guest. At the last Lunacon, Mike Flynn was the moderator for the panels I consistently liked least. My recollection was that he was a know-it-all who made points only to emphasize his intelligence…
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Lunacon 2014 (0): Arrival
After a five-year hiatus, I am back at Lunacon, at the suggestion of my lovely wife (who says it’s important we tend to our individual needs as well as our married ones, and who — I believe — also might like having the apartment to herself for a weekend. 🙂 ) Standing in line to…
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Marc Cohn and guests at the City Winery : 2013 Feb 14
I’ve sort of blown the deadline on my 30 Days of Marc Cohn, but I can at least offer up this playlist. 🙂 “From the Station” “Ghost Train” “Perfect Love” “The Letter” with Jon Leventhal “29 Ways” “Listening to Levon” with Dave Mansfield “Healing Hands” with Rebecca Pidgeon “Witness” with Rebecca Pidgeon “Silver Thunderbird” “Walking…
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Art and Design, Fail
I’ve been doing a little reading on the art of design and the failure of art as design. (For example, see this piece about how objects for human use should be designed for, you know, humans.) That led me to the International Push/Pull Pictogram Design Competition, tasked with designing exactly what it says: a non-verbal…
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Miracles and Wonder
I just received the Kingston 64 GB USB flash drive shown above. It holds (duh) 64 gigabytes of data. I’ve included a US quarter for size comparisons. My first computer was a Commodore-64, for which I had the venerable C1541 floppy disk drive. That used 5.25″ floppy disks — which were actually floppy, you could…
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Life Goes On (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 11)
“Life Goes On” Join the Parade This is one of those pop songs that have a catchy melody but when you stop to listen to the words, you say, “Wait, what?” It’s a pop song about dying, but it’s surprisingly upbeat. Marc is a little brutal here. Life goes on, no matter what we lose: Elvis,…
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De-tuned
I wrote this nearly five years ago. I was mad then; now I’m more or less just resigned. The intellectual commons is being fenced off, now more than ever. I think we’re losing more than outlets for creativity or profit; we’re losing the shared language to remember who we were, who we are. ============== De-Tuned…
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Turn on Your Radio (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 4)
“Turn on Your Radio” Burning the Daze This is a very gentle song you might expect to hear winding down an evening. It’s got a catchy refrain which I find myself humming. It also ends with a somewhat-strange coda: Everybody had a hard year And everybody had a good time Everybody had a wet dream…
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The Calling (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 3)
“The Calling (The Ghost of Charlie Christian”) Join the Parade This is a song that sort of snuck up on me. I first heard it in concert (in at least 2007, though I think it was earlier), and it initially underwhelmed me. The guitar is amazing, but that’s Shayne Fontane and to be expected. It…
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Giving Up the Ghost (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 2)
“Giving Up the Ghost” Join the Parada Appropriately, this is a very haunting melody. It’s a ghost story, of course. As is usual for Marc Cohn, it’s also an extended metaphor for a relationship in trouble. She gave me something I needed but now the feeling is gone And it’s high time I told her…