The Year 2000–as it was called before 2000–is looking awfully distant with each passing year. Will it ever happen? And what I mean by this is the chasm between what was promised and what we’ve got: the old “Where’s my jetpack?” meme. Or, “I wanted cars in tubes but all I’ve got is Twitter.” Yes,… Continue reading Cars Will Travel in Tubes by Year 2000
To a Swell Dad
I’d kill to have someone give me a card that says, “To a Swell Dad – Handyman, You Fit the Bill.” This is from an ad for Gibson’s Cards, LIFE Magazine, June 15, 1953.
Let’s All Check Out Valerie Plame’s Hot Beach Body
Search results on Google and other search engines are either organic or not. Organic means that the results are supposedly raw and unfiltered. “Not” means paid or sponsored results. Yet even those organic results aren’t so organic and natural. At the very least, Google knows who you are, so it tailors results for you. What… Continue reading Let’s All Check Out Valerie Plame’s Hot Beach Body
Zona Sage and Paul Camera: Progression, But Not Fast Enough
Sharpen your knife, go back in the past, and slice off any section. It all says something. Everything is significant, every mote of dust on the microfiche slide. We flip to San Francisco. We look at a woman named Zona Sage. In 1970, Zona Sage is a 25 year-old law student at Hastings College of… Continue reading Zona Sage and Paul Camera: Progression, But Not Fast Enough
Long-Forgotten G.I. Coffeehouses: Hotbeds of Anti-War Dissent
In this age of freely flowing words–often too many of them–it’s hard to imagine a day when conversation actually had to be nurtured. During the Vietnam War, anti-war activists had far fewer avenues of discussion available than today: no Twitter, blogs, YouTube, or social media. Self-publication was largely confined to mimeographed newspapers. Vietnam anti-war activism… Continue reading Long-Forgotten G.I. Coffeehouses: Hotbeds of Anti-War Dissent