History
My opinions and research on various topics.
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Monteczuma
I have bathed again, the water rich In frothy copalxocotl, I am made clean. As I dress, I am informed that there are representatives from a king across the sea approaching our city. From my palace I can see the glints of sunlight coming off of their metal clothing-standing among them are huge beasts which…
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Cortez
Walking down from out of the small hills, we saw on the lake, floating like a ship in a fevered dream, Tenochtitlan. Its palaces and temples and strange structures unnamed, its majesty rivaling anything in Europe. Everything in ordered rows, painted in bright colors, marketplaces full of people and fruits and vegetables and wares, everywhere…
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Curtis LeMay
Red and orange glints off of the buffered stainless steel bellies of cruel butterflies, and in curious curvatures the collapsing wooden homes are reflected on bubble glass. The flicker and leap of crackling paper browning and blackening where once was a room partition and a sleeping mat. The horrible bee buzz rumble overhead is the…
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The Ballad of Pete Seeger
One of my great heroes has passed. Pete Seeger was America. He stood up for the rights of workers, fought against corporate warmongers, and worked to unite the races. His music is classic and eternal. His dreams a gift to all of us. This is a meager little song I wrote for him: Pete Seeger…
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Ignaz Semmelweis
There was a kick into your ribs and the crack of those bones was an echo from memory, breaking open rib cages performing autopsies for knowledge gained-you recall as you spit up your vivid red blood the learned and the wise who challenged your discovery and denied reality. Your sickness is default stress from…
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Gettysburg, 11/19/1863
The ground still had that smell like a butcher shop that was left bloody in the summer and remained unclean to freeze in the winter. Here staged on this acreage was a performance between participants belonging to the same continental genotype- language the same, culture very different. Clad in blue and gray costumes, smoke…
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Mother of All Demos
Doug Englebart single-handedly invented (along with his amazing development team) the modern world of computers as we understand them, geared for use to non experts and useful for more than just calculating. In 1968 he demonstrated in front of a live audience his vision of a networked office environment, with hyperlinks, a mouse oriented GUI,…
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What do you see?
Philo T. Farnsworth was the American inventor of electronic (as opposed to mechanical) television. He single-handedly designed and built the first complete system, from cameras to receivers. The first person ever broadcast on his system and the first woman on television, was his wife Pem. He credited her equally responsible for the development of the…
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Billy Pilgrim
The city is a riot of color. The stones speak as loud as human voices, the angled streets and the sideways glances of the citizens walking the pavement stones, set to music the standards of ancients; whose strong arms and hands placed one on top of the other each of these piles of masonry…
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29,028 Feet, 1953
I The mountain stands taller than any part of the sky, the air so thin, two men so high. It’s there for the taking, it’s there for the eye to eat, it’s there like wildfire made of ice for the heartbeat and there is nothing more that can be made of it, excepting death and…
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Avalon
The man moves through traffic floating, seemingly apart from the stream. Around, so many stand and watch. All colors, all genders, hazy like a dream. He recognizes a few faces, some from his preexisting life, each a connective link, like the woman sitting next to him, grinning, dressed in pink. He smiles, she waves.…
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Second Sun
This poem is my attempt at understanding… I I have no regrets. I did what I was ordered and I did it right. I have no problem sleeping at night. At no point could we hear any ragged breaths, we saved the east from American deaths. None of our boys would wade into the Rising…
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So Long Frank Lloyd Wright, Finale
The 1940s brought Wright new challenges. Wright encountered success and failure throughout the 1940s. His strong anti-war stance, especially after the attack on Pearl Harbor, brought government blackballing to his extensive wartime housing projects, including the Cloverleaf housing scheme. His Utopian ideals couldn’t be destroyed, even in the course of a global conflict. Wright’s own…
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High on Hydrogen
There was a time when the skies of Earth held leviathans. Quicksilver flashing overhead, the roar of diesel engines, shadows that would cover whole city blocks, ocean liners in the air. Across the Atlantic the airships would go, cruising at nearly 90 miles an hour, waiters serving beverages and hot meals in the dining rooms.…
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By Chance Two Separate Glances Meet
Light exploded around the sky in flashes of blue ice and dragon’s fire red, orange phosphorescence and acid greens. The crowd, thousands thick and thronging the great plaza, all watched together. The celebration was for the achievements of the human race, for all of their hard work, all of their dreaming and hoping. All…
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Thinkin’ like Lincoln
I just watched the fantastic new film about Abraham Lincoln, appropriately titled “Lincoln.” I was struck by the quality of Daniel Day Lewis’ performance, how he appeared to totally inhabit the character…defining what the 21st century will see as the real Lincoln. As one of my family members remarked, “I thought Lincoln had a deeper…
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Deserving of Observing
My wife and I are from Southern California. I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by a wealth of beauty; from the shoreline of my native Long Beach, to the snow capped San Bernardinos; the rolling hills of Los Angeles, to the quite coves of Cabrillo beach. Even though I now live in Washington State…
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So Long Frank Lloyd Wright Continued
During this time of momentous change, Wright’s own domestic situation saw a change towards permanence with a much younger woman, Olgivanna Ivanovna Lazovich. Born in Montenegro of auspicious decent, she was very beautiful—with dark, mysterious eyes. She was also a follower of George Gurdjieff, a mystic with a large, cult-like following. Wright first saw her…
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If Only We Had Taller Been…
There is a video circulating from the 1971 conference revolving around Mariner 9’s mission to the Red Planet. I found it while browsing io9.com- it was embedded in an article describing how NASA has named the Curiosity rover’s landing spot “Bradbury Landing.” There gathered in that room are three of the greatest thinkers of any…
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The Color of History
Of the many forms of art I enjoy, photography is the one most closely associated in my mind with total immediacy. The camera captures the details of a scene instantaneously…providing us with photons frozen in time. One of my deep interests is developing a way to “restore” color information to black and white imagery for…
The Numinous Cosmos 