I’ve been on this wonderful community of global railroad enthusiasts on a site created by a person in the UK. I grew up with trains as my father got me a Lionel set and then created his own HO layout. There were some big names in model reailroading when I was growing up and I […]
___________________________________ In times of crisis we should reflect on the heros and heroines of our lives. Especially when they are no longer with us. Like John Coltrane. I discovered Trane three years after law school and three years into working for a global corporation in downtown San Francisco. I found Trane by working my way […]
John Fraim It’s not exactly a shift in the San Andreas Fault. But I can say that my personal muses are shifting again on me. I get my old interest in creating music back and start to resurrect the digital instrument members of the Midnight Oil Band (MOB) from storage in our downstairs film studio […]
Yeah, I know this doesn’t exactly sound like the famous song “Old Man River.” I was inspired to create my own version of it a few nights ago after watching Show Boat on TCM. I think the song is one of the most beautiful songs America has produced and says much about American history. The […]
Disco Times – 4/11/21 The music muse has struck again and I’ve gotten a few of my digital instruments out of storage and set them up in my office on the table right behind my desk. I moved just three instruments out of storage:The Korg Minilogue Polyphonic Analogue Synthesizer, the Korg Electribe Sampler and the […]
Stupidity today is on display more than ever. Yet it is that “elephant in the room” few talk about or are aware of. There is much to be learned about it from an essay by an Italian economic historian named Carol Cipolla (August 15, 1922 – September 5, 2000). Graduating from the University of Pavia in […]
A good documentary on Hemingway was on PBS tonight. A Ken Burns film and it is really good. Tonight was Part 1 and covered Hemingway up to 1928 when he was 29 and just written A Farewell to Arms. I did my senior thesis in high school on Hemingway and read a great biography on him […]
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, was curious to see whether the then-non-peer-reviewed postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University Press) would publish a submission which “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” The submission was an experiment to test the journal’s intellectural rigor. Specifically, to investigate whether “a leading North […]
