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Saturday, August 18, 2001
Don't do this at life 
| | I barely knew Rob Breszny back when we both lived in North Carolina and wrote for The Sun. He moved to California in the Seventies and I followed a few years later when the ad agency I co-founded opened a branch office (soon to be the only office) in Palo Alto. |
| | Rob remained one of the stars (in more ways than twelve) in my journalistic and creative firmament, and easy to follow because his column is carried in approximately 4 million alternative weeklies. |
| | In all the time I've been reading Rob's relentlessly inventive and surreally optimistic horoscopes, I've never run across a reference to a human being I actually knew other than Rob himself. Until last night, when I picked up a paper from last week that had this horoscope for Scorpio (sign of my wife, daughter, grandmother, publisher and countless good friends): |
| | When I was a weirdo attending Duke University some years ago, I wasn't half as freaky as my friend Alex. At the tender age of 21 he had already forged himself into a mythic figure of Kerouac-ian proportions. His writing was breathtakingly original. As yearbook editor, he produced a bizarrely entertaining tome that mimicked the style of outlaw author William S. Burroughs. We all expected that when Alex left the ivory tower he'd evolve into a towering figure on the national literary scene. Alas, an old classmate reports that he is now an executive at a top ad agency, churning out inflammatory copy to sell cars and perfume. I offer him up as your reverse role model, Scorpio. The stars are urging you to move in a direction exactly opposite to his. With fierce authenticity, head towards the land of more integrity and wilder soul. |
| | I know who he's talking about and the name isn't Alex. And to protect the anonymity Rob surely would rather give the guy I won't name him here. But I am amazed that I haven't thought about the guy in years, even though my old agency grew out of his original (and yes, wild) work at Duke. He was in our agency's early days an object of veneration and even envy. |
| | So I just looked him up on Google. Sure enough, he runs an agency in New York with a pile of blue-chip clients. I'm sure he's at a state of integrity with what he's doing. And his agency's ads on the whole beat the crap out of most of the other ads you see on TV. |
| | Still, it makes me glad, reading Rob and looking at this guy's work (which required downloading Quicktime 5 and restarting my machine involuntarily, killing this post the first time I put it up), that I eventually took the road less annoying to the rest of the world. |
| | Not that I'd give up my experience with the ad agency either. It was fun and I learned a shitload of good stuff. |
I'd have agreed until I got this here Titanium
| | Jim Roepcke says ...for my tastes, Microsoft is a better hardware company than software company, and Apple is a better software company than hardware company. |
Rocky Mountain Wide
| | This time tomorrow it'll be Tuesday in Colorado. I'll be in Keystone at Jabbercon. I'm unprepared in more ways than I can describe, but I'm very jazzed to be going, and to drive, for the first time in my life, from Denver through the Front Range and into Colorado's high country. I've flown over it so many times I can recognize countless features on sight (I'm an inveterate window-sitter). But it'll be way cool to do the same on the ground. |
| | And the tune in my mind is one from the National Lampoon Radio Hour (or was it Lemmings?). Read it with the voice of, say, Neil Young... |
| | Stuck in this old city now,
Where livin' ain't no fun.
Where steel and glass and concrete
Cancel out the wind and sun.
And I'm thinkin' of last winter now,
When we walked hand-in-hand,
In the trails of the Colorado Rockies. |
| | The wind sang us a lullaby.
The snow was thick as cream.
And icicles were chandeliers
Like crystals in a dream.
And the streams were strips of diamonds
And the hills were white as snow
And a bear ate all our soybeans in the night. |
| | Oh, Colorado's calling me ...
From her hillsides and her rivers
And her mesas and her trees.
When blizzards snap the powerlines
And all the toilets freeze ...
In December in the Colordo Rockies. |
| | We had time and space and freedom,
We had love and peace to spare.
Though we ran out of things to smoke
And say and eat and wear.
And the morning of the avalanche,
The Yeti kidnapped Blanche,
And took her to his cave up in the Rockies. |
| | Oh, Colorado's calling me ...
From her glaciers and her canyons
And her badlands and ravines.
When infectious hepatitis
Was all that came to stay,
In January in the Colorado Rockies. |
| | Baby didn't die until
We burned up all our wood.
Considering we ate her raw,
She tasted pretty good!
Then the fascist health inspectors
Dug us out and mailed us home ...
Except for Blanche who wouldn't leave her man. |
| | Oh, Colorado's calling me ....
(Hey! You!)
From her mountains and her rivers
And her meadows and her trees.
They tell me I'll be cured soon,
Thawed, and ready to return ...
When it's April in the Colorado Rockies.
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| | (Tony Hendra / Christopher Guest / Sean Kelly - 1973) |
| | All I could remember for sure about that song was "yeti kidnapped Blanche," but it was enough for Google. I just hit "I'm feeling lucky" and was given one more reason to believe it. |
| | It was Lemmings, by the way. (Great show that was the forerunner of Saturday Night Live.) Found that out by Google, too. |
It's even better than it appears
| | I've been noticing that searches on Google have been easier and better on an ongoing basis. And that I've been taking those improvements for granted — that's how good they are. |
| | With the latest Davenet, Dave raises these improvements up to consciousness. The most obvious improvement is in currency. Stuff is more and more up to date, all the time. But I think there are other improvements as well. I just can't put my frontal lobe on them. |
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