Thursday, March 17, 1994 This is a test This is a test of your nuclear personality network. This is a test of your boiling point. This is a test to determine your social flexibility. Had this been a real social flexibility emergency, proper authorities would have immediately appeared at your door to provide information and assistance about how best to handle the situation. This is no longer a test. This has been a test of your nuclear personality network. Thinking of the above piece as my performance on arriving at the door of not(Alex) and not(Alex or not(Alex). But they weren't home. So I left the reason for my appearance at their door leaning against the front door and went on my way. How inconsiderate of them to not be home. Tuesday I invited Liz to their house for dinner (they had previously invited me). Walking up College Av, from Davis Square, toward Tufts, I can tell Liz is short on patience. She almost decides to turn around and go home. But she didn't. Around 11:30pm (we arrived about 8pm) I mention to Liz we should be leaving so as to get my bus to Watertown before too late. She had such a good time, and was in such an improved moode, that her 10pm deadline for leaving passed without a remark. Well, this writer will admit to also having an enjoyable time--even though Alex was not present and un- available for torture. Last night's dream was about hang gliding. It was me soaring through the air. Normally that would be an impossible dream for me. Perhaps it had some- thing to do with Cynthia's description of Hans' Santa Maria kite? He made a kite of Columbus's ship that was 6+ meters high and, from a distance, looked like the real thing. She described helping him unpack and assemble it for a flight. Four people were required to get it into the air. Last night we had dinner at Bertucchi's in Harvard Square. Bill Zwicker, who was visiting from NYC, paid with his company gold credit card. Fine by me. Bill and I first met in early 1977. He had heard Brooke and Schlomo (two people from Friedrichshof) when they were on All Things Considered at WGBH. I new a producer there and got them an interview. 2-5 million people hear the program. Bill was the only person who responded. Anyway, he still keeps in touch from time to time. He now lives and works in NYC. $1,500/month for a small one-bedroom apartment. But a short walk from where he works. "ma" encountered me on the Internet a bit over a year ago. It was just one of those things where two people hit it off and get along. We met for the first time about two weeks ago. She did not resemble anything like what was in my imagination. Well, we have met a second time, last Tuesday, for dinner, with Liz, etc, and things haven't changed a bit. But I am willing to give her more time. After all, it doesn't seem to have much influence one way or the other. And Alex, who also lives at 911, may be able to help me with one of my ideas. Birds on the Internet. There are coke machines, coffee pots, and toasters on the Internet. Why shouldn't you be able to finger a microphone on the prairie in Wyoming and hear the latest thing sung by a meadow lark? He has some experience doing analog to digital conversion. But it seems to be mostly with converting only one bit. Well, he can improve on that. YOu would need at least 16-bit sampling, some thousands of times a second? This would go into a file, or, at some point in the future, be available in real time. I would much rather know what some bird in Wyoming is saying than the status of a coke machine in Australia. The latter is easily available but not nearly so wonderful. I will have to suggest this to Mr. B in Pinedale, Wyoming. Then find somebody in the rainforest, or near the sea, and so forth. For those of you wondering what happened to The Cambridge Chronicles for the last three months or so, ask me to send you a copy of my USFIRST notes. Friday, March 18, 1994 Harvard Square subway. Inbound track. Up ahead I see a familiar face. She is an attractive young woman engaged in animated conversation with one of the areas Spare Change sellers. She is making strong eye contact, noding her head, uh-huh-ing at every sentence. But, in the end, she says no and goes back to reading her newspaper. I sit down near her and look her in the eye. She looks back--and then goes back to her newspaper. Alison, I say. She looks up and slightly shocked, says my name, and quickly folds her newspaper, The National Enquirer, and stuffs it in her bag. Gorgeous Alison who I first met as a teenager in high school. She is now a lawyer/businesswoman. Her company helps arrange business deals all over the world. She goes to work in the late afternoon and often leaves her office after midnight. There are a lot of calls to Japan. She came back from some weeks in Hungary at the end of January. Alison makes a reference to a boyfriend who just turned 40. She is now 32. The reference came after telling her about Edwin's 50th birthday dinner at the Averoff. A select group of old friends was invited, his treat, inclu- ding the bellydancer. It became my responsibility to find places to leave a number of Federal Reserve Notes when she jiggled over to our table. Well, it was possible to find a number of places to stow them, but it would have been much easier if she'd invited me back to her place where more time would have been available, and fewer distractions. Even so, the got placed in places where she would eventually find them. So Edwin turned 50 and has 3 big things on his plate of plans. First, become a hunk. Second, live out his kinky, per- verse sexual fantasies. Third, don't lose any more money in the stock market. That last one may not be exactly what he meant. The first two are clear. He and I go all the way back to May, 1968. How's it going, buffalo Ed, I remarked to him as we met one day on the fifth floor of a Technology Square building where one could safely unzip one's pants--and pull it out. We were both stand- ing there, pointing in the same direction, for the same reason. I continue to do the same thing one or more times every day, although Edwin is seldom there these days. Cynthia says Don called the other day, two times, two different days, looking for me. She answered on one call and had nearly an hour conversation with him. He and I haven't talked for some months. Last fall I said some things to him that were quite unpleasant--for him. So he refused to speak to me on meeting. I would say hello, the first few times, then said nothing when we would meet. He sent email several days ago saying that Bob got a needle stick during his public health officer job in Alaska. It surprised me that Bob had no immediate course of action to pursue. Maybe it was just a conversa- tional gambit to start talking again. Cynthia says he recalled old times at the house in Dorchester. Especially dignificant for him was immediately after Erika's accident. Erika completely regressed to an infantile state from her head injury. Don remembers me unobtrusively following her around the house as the two of us talked, yet keeping a close eye on her so she wouldn't hurt her- self. This story was prompted by Cynthia's telling him that I don't answer the phone here because Erika and Cynthia's mother don't want Cynthia to have any- thing to do with me. Don finds it hard to understand how Erika can treat me this way after my spending a year taking care of her after the accident. Erika has no memory of those days or events. She just has her grownup experience of hearing me say whatever I have to say. Cynthia has resisted their opinions by hiding her relationship with me. But Don knows the whole story. There was a story in a recent weekly newsmagazine about the Clintons. There was a line about how none of their closest friends really understand the dynamic between them. Who doesn't have a similar story? How old is the line: I don't see what he/she sees in her/him? Don tells Cynthia about a telephone service we might consider. You can get other numbers for the same phone line. Each number has a distinctive ring. Then the person being called can tell when the phone is ringing for them. That would solve part of the problem of me never being able to answer the phone here. Monday, March 21, 1994 I have a new concept/idea about what represents the height, the "ne plus ultra" of our modern civilization. This picture came to me on the 4th floor of 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, on opening... a refrigerator. And their it was--the representative artifact, the evidence, the undeniable proof! A car- ton of juice made from exotic fruits from all over the world. Actually, there were several cartons, containing several combinations. All to satisfy our con- sumer pleasure. Collected from all over the world, brought together as never before possible, and made available for a pittance. The mango, peach, orange, is especially satifying to this consumer. It is also satisfying to be partici- pating in this global enterprise. Readers are encouraged to supply examples that may rise further than the height attained by the above mentioned case. From: Jon@ Date: Fri, 18 Mar 1994 15:50:35 Subject: Re: theater,pizza,dream,flying,birds in Wyoming just a quick note to let you know it was great to read something from you (some i dont read, but seems to be lower volume, but you are busy i know). plus, i have been in and out of work for some time. lots of stories to tell, and i will too, once i get time/privacy. but may be jeapordizing my ftp site and www site some time soon, so is of importance to us both (and many others). as it is, i am kinda snooping around for places to put them both. however, i am generally doing well, and getting things in order a bit, and may even get to visit your corner of the world/US this summer, but will explain with rest of aforementioned story(ies). -jon Date: Mon, 21 Mar 94 14:17:33 EST From: Jon@ Subject: adding my email to cc please do. i also kinda forgot to mention (over the many years(?!)) that i love the stuff you do on the net (and otherwise), in the sense it just sorta spews out personal stuff for the taking. to me this is one of the wonderful uses of the net. kinda like the "personal zines" people make -- not absolutely relative to anything in any readers life, but interesting just because it is about life. the net makes a great medium for this and i am always happy to find some hidden treasure chest of this kind of info out there. i have been happy to find a few www sites containing this sorta thing. (incidently, i have included pointers to your directory on my ftp site in my www pages, so web-crawlers might happen upon your wonderful stuff.) oh, and thanks for "the book of jon" some time back. neato. -jon Date: Sun, 20 Mar 94 20:29:22 PST From: map@ Subject: Re: The Cambridge Chronicles POSSLQing w/ The Sin again? Congrats. If you have a netmail addr for Ed[win], I'll chide him for not inviting me to the Averof, else please do so on my behalf localtelephonically. Re USFIRST, by an amusing coincidence the same day I got you megafile, the p-mail brought a "Best of Technology Review" (inside an Alumni Assn. ballot) with an article about the '93 instantiation. On new business, I've been given a PS/2 box [pron. Piss Too] and hence have had to look closely at MS-DOS [pron. Mess Do's]. Billionaire Bill is even less deserving of his lousy lucre than I'd thought--and I hadn't thought he deserved it at all. He ought to have to pay handsome pensions to Surviving Real Programmers, such, of course, as Our Noble Selves.... cheers, map Date: Sat, 19 Mar 94 00:18:23 EST From: ma@ Subject: NYC Ah, but we forgot to talk about NYC. Sara, my street-perf partner, and I, went to be in a toy-theater festival at Theater for the New City. We normally don't do things in a "toy theater", but reshaped it for this event so as to fit the bill. Normally, we do things on top of a card-table. We call ourselves The News Sharks; we tell absurd stories that we bill as "news of the week", and enact them on the table using various household objects, toys, pieces of cloth, beer cans, plastic fruit, and other detritus. So for the festival Sara, who is a professional puppetteer, built a toy theater, and we civilized our show so as to fit into it. This we did as part of the main show. In addition, we also did a piece in the lobby -- which housed a "toy theater exhibit" with extra performances -- involving Sara's mother singing an old French song about feudal sex customs, and us enacting it with feudally attired chess pieces and such. A smash hit, in other words. The main thing, of course, was to see the competition. The competition turned out to be soemwhat disappointing. A profoundly gratifying discovery. Date: Mon, 21 Mar 94 15:45:18 EST From: ma@ Subject: Thursday Are you free Thu during the day? If so, and you feel like coming by around noon, we can shoot some video. Arn needs a video for a proposal he is submitting to Franklin Furnace, and you can also do one of me saying "PAUSES". Perhaps there would be apple fritters. To: ma@ Subject: Thursday,Heisenberg,apple gunkies Date: Mon, 21 Mar 94 23:06:46 EST Sure, Thursday sounds about right. But about those apple fritters, do you mean "may be" in the Heisenberg sense of there may be a dead cat in the box, or do you mean in the sense of there is a food shortage in your area? Thursday will be a good time to demonstrate how instantaneous memes get injected into the cultural bloodstream and spread instantly to its furthest corners! Remind me to show you the evidence. Date: Tue, 22 Mar 94 12:34:28 EST From: ma@ Subject: Re: Thursday,Heisenberg,apple gunkies I mean "may be" in the sense that the whim to make fritters may strike me, but then again it may not. Is that the Heisenberg sense? I guess ultimately it is, right?