Obituary
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Remembering Kim Cameron
Got word yesterday that Kim Cameron had passed. Hit me hard. Kim was a loving and loved friend. He was also a brilliant and influential thinker and technologist. That’s Kim, above, speaking at the 2018 EIC conference in Germany. His topics were The Laws of Identity on the Blockchain and Informational Self-Determination in a Post Facebook/Cambridge Analytica Era (in… Continue reading
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Remembering Gail Sheehy
It bums me out that Gail Sheehy passed without much notice—meaning I only heard about it in passing. And I didn’t hear about it, actually; I saw it on CBS’ Sunday Morning, where her face passed somewhere between Tom Seaver’s and John Thompson’s in the September 6 show’s roster of the freshly dead. I was… Continue reading
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Angel from Maywood
John Prine and I are both from Maywood, though not the same one. His Maywood was in Illinois and mine was in New Jersey. Not a real connection, but one among many small doors souls might open to common likes. One of those we share is country. Both of us were domesticated rural animals, born… Continue reading
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Remembering Freddy Herrick
The picture of Freddy Herrick I carry everywhere is in my wallet, on the back of my membership card for a retail store. It got there after I loaned my extra card to Freddy so he could use it every once in awhile. As Freddy explained it, one day, while checking out at the store,… Continue reading
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Loving Leonard
I was as deeply affected by learning Leonard Cohen died as I was by the election results. Maybe more. I can’t name an artist whose songs mean more to me than his. Not Dylan, not (I’m thinking…) anybody. (Here’s how he lifted me one time when I was sick a few years ago.) Through the… Continue reading
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A tale of two stars
(This post is reblogged from this one, posted on June 11, 2001.) The best live performance I’ve ever attended was John Lee Hooker playing St. Joseph’s AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in Durham, North Carolina. It was around the turn of the 80s, and in those days I went to pretty much every interesting act that came through… Continue reading
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Forever nine
This is for Christopher Baker. Chris was nine years old when a friend shot him through the head by mistake, using a gun the friend’s father kept for protection. Chris was a great kid: fun-loving, kind and athletic. In the open casket at his funeral, he wore a baseball cap that covered the fatal wound.… Continue reading
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Remembering Big Davy
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. — Mahatma Gandhi I’m not sure if Gandhi actually said that. Somebody did. My best human chance of finding who said it — or at least of gaining a learned enlargement on the lesson — would have been David… 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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Remembering Bob Kauffman
When the Los Angeles Clippers open their first game at home this season, I want them to pause and celebrate their original franchise player: Bob Kauffman, the team’s all-star center for its first three seasons, when they were the Buffalo Braves. I also think the team should retire Bob’s jersey, #44. For the ceremony the team should also bring out his four daughters,… Continue reading
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Every thing has a face, and vice versa
That line came to me a few minutes ago, as I looked and read through the latest photographic blog posts by Stephen Lewis in his blog, Bubkes). This one… … titled Farmyard, Grandmother, Chicken, and Ovid in Exile, is accompanied by richly detailed text, including this: The courtyard in the photo no longer exists; it and and… Continue reading
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Why we’ll miss #EricTheActor
What makes Howard Stern’s radio show so compelling, besides Howard himself, is that everybody who contributes to the show is a character. That goes for all the staff members who come on the air, and all the callers — especially the oddballs called the Wack Pack. There’s Mariann from Brooklyn, Bigfoot from the backwoods of Vermont (and… 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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Remembering Robin
I only met Robin Williams once, at a trade show, back in ’03 or so. I was walking across the floor when I ran into my old friend Tom Rielly. Tom grabbed my arm and said, “Come here. I want you to meet somebody.” He pulled me though a small crowd to the guy in… Continue reading
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On promise lost
I was digging around for links toward a post on Brian Knappenberger‘s crowdsourced Aaron Swartz documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy, when I learned that Malik Bendjelloul, the documentary filmmaker who won an Oscar last year for Searching for Sugar Man, was also dead — like Aaron, a suicide. I would guess that readers of this blog are more familiar with… 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