history
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What are the balls on Prague’s spires called??
One of the things that fascinates me about Prague are the skewers atop the spires of its many iconic buildings, each of which pierces a shiny ball. It’s a great look. I am sure there’s a reason for those things, other than the look itself. I am also sure there is a word for the… Continue reading
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Content as Icebergs
In Snow on the Water I wrote about the ‘low threshold of death” for what media folks call “content” — which always seemed to me like another word for packing material. But its common parlance now. For example, a couple days ago I heard a guy on WEEI, my fave sports station in Boston, yell… Continue reading
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A history lesson in how to automate journalism with war and sports metaphors
What I’ve always loved most about the Web† is how it allows each of us to publish on our own, as individuals, for the whole world. I started doing that as soon as I could get a dial-up account with a nearby ISP (the late Batnet of Palo Alto) in 1995. Here is one of… Continue reading
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The greatest western I’ve ever read
Update on 20 January 2026: This post is getting action, so I should add that my son and I visited Love Ranch two years after I posted it. Here is a gallery of photos, all captioned. And the title one: — is John McPhee‘s Rising From the Plains. It’s one book among five collected in… Continue reading
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The Giant Zero
Many years ago, Craig Burton shared the best metaphor for the Internet that I have ever heard, or seen in my head. He called it hollow sphere: a giant three-dimensional zero. He called it that because a sphere’s geometry best illustrates a system in which every end, regardless of its physical location, is functionally zero… Continue reading
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We can all make TV. Now what?
Look where Meerkat and Periscope point. I mean, historically. They vector toward a future where anybody anywhere can send live video out to the glowing rectangles of the world. If you’ve looked at the output of either, several things become clear about their inevitable evolutionary path: Mobile phone/data systems will get their gears stripped, in both… Continue reading
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The best 3-point shooter you never saw
I remember the first time I saw Dwight Durante* shoot. It was in the old Guilford College gym. Catawba College was the visiting team. Guilford in those days was a small college basketball powerhouse, ranked among the top NAIA schools. Our coach was future hall-of-famer Jerry Steele. We had three players who would be drafted by… Continue reading
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Lives of the dead
A couple weekends ago I visited the graves of relatives and ancestors on my father’s side at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx. All of them died before I was born, but my Grandma Searls and her sisters often visited there, and I thought, Hey, now that I’m in New York a lot, I should visit these… Continue reading
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Remembering Uncle Chris
Yesterday was my Uncle Chris’s 100th birthday. When he passed fifteen years ago, I wrote the following, which I just unearthed from the Old Web. Now seems like a good time to expose it to the world. He was the embodiment of a Good Man, I still miss him, and I’d like his many great-grandkids to know… Continue reading
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#10books that changed my life
There’s a challenge going around Facebook: to name ten books that have changed your life. So I’ve thought about my own, and kept a running list here in draft form. Now that it’s close enough to publish, methinks, here they are, in no order, and not limited to ten (or to Facebook) — War and… Continue reading
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A visit to the old ‘hood
A couple weeks ago I took a walk around the historic neighborhood in Fort Lee where my extended family had a home — 2063 Hoyt Avenue — from the turn of the last century into the 1950s. It’s where my parents lived when I was born, and where my aunt and grandmother sat for my sister and… Continue reading
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Radio and the Web, 2001
Since my old blog (still running, amazingly, on an old server somewhere within Verisign) will some day be Snow on the Water, and conversation about radio has commenced below that post, I decided to re-post March 21, 2001. Here goes… Blast from the past Tune in here right now to catch Larry Lujack on KNEW,… Continue reading
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Snow on the Water
I’ve been intrigued by Fotopedia since it showed up in ’09, especially since I do a shitload of travel photography. But I never posted anything there, because I was afraid it would die. And now, says here, it will. In seven days. The reason: As of August 10, 2014, Fotopedia.com will close and our iOS… Continue reading
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Happy Birthday, Pop.
My father, Allen H. Searls, would have turned 106 today. It’s not inconceivable that he might have lived this long. His mother lived almost to 108, and his little sister died at 101 just last December. But Pop made it to 70, which still isn’t bad. He was, to me at least, the living embodiment of a good man:… Continue reading
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Remembering Dr. Jack Ramsay
Back in the early ’90s I was waiting for an elevator one night at a high rise hotel when I was joined by a group of Miami heat basketball players and Jack Ramsay, who was then most famously the former coach of the Portland Trailblazers, a team he led to an NBA championship in 1977. But… Continue reading
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It’s Indie Time
Aral Balkan is doing a bang-up job getting Indie rolling as an adjectival meme. He’s doing it with his Indie Phone, Indie Tech Manifesto and a talk titled Free is a Lie. To put the Indie movement in context, it helps to realize that it’s been on the tech road at least since 1964, when Paul Baran, one of the Internet’s… Continue reading