Dogs and Bikes

Self explanatory

All Fives

A tale of customer service.. The Morgan Fairchild, a Model Nine residential rocket, had just cleared the atmosphere and begun approaching a low earth orbit. Oates heard two quick pings, then what sounded like a can of soda opening. A gong sounded, then the voice, so calm, so matter-of-fact it could put you to sleep. […]

Petrovsky resurfaces

Note: for best results, listen to Elmer Bernstein’s The Great Escape while reading this document. A letter from my old acquaintance Petrovsky arrived just the other day. Until two years ago, I hadn’t seen P since the old days and thought P had disappeared from the face of the earth. But recently P’d resurfaced and […]

Playing ping pong with Steve Jobs

It was definitely Steve Jobs. Sure, Steve Jobs has been dead for years, but the person in the body was Jobs. Lean build with casual clothes loosely hanging on him. He sounded like that actor, not Peter Coyote, the other guy, who was in that movie with Russell Crowe and Guy…what’s his name. Pierce Patchett […]

The PowerPoint Fiasco

Do it as long as I have and you’ll see a lot of PowerPoint. Bad PowerPoint. Slide after slide crammed with words, bullets, charts, and clip art. That’s right. Clip art. And a presenter reading every word you see on the screen in glorious 1024 x 768 high fuzz resolution. Sometimes they get creative and […]

Fear of falling

In 1987, the world’s human population reached 5 billion and the last of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō (Moho braccatus) died. According to the bird’s Wikipedia entry, “The last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō was male, and his song was recorded for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The male was recorded singing a mating call, to a female that would never […]