It’s a freaky new age, and I don’t entirely approve of it.  But that doesn’t mean I won’t play with the freaky new stuff that the freaky new age makes available.  (After all, I don’t entirely approve of automobiles or guns, either.  But I know how to drive and shoot.)

For example – 

It recently occurred to me that Google Earth makes it possible to virtually visit (from the point of view of a satellite) every place I’ve ever lived.  In my case, though, that’s not really a lot of places . . . so the results are compact enough for me to share them with my fellow Brainiacs:

**********

Home #1, Central Wichita, KS (Age 0 to Age 5)

I remember this as a little house with a little garage.  (It’s the house in the middle of the photo, with the red car in the driveway.)  So, since I only lived there to age 5, and since kids generally remember things as being bigger than they really were, this place must have been tiny.  It was enough for Dad, Mom, me, and Middle Brother — but when Mom became pregnant with Baby Brother, we were out of there.

The street at the bottom of the photo didn’t exist when we lived there.  That was a field where watermelons grew.  The farmer gave us all we could eat.

The trees out front were mulberry trees.  I fed the mulberries to my first pet, a box turtle with a name I don’t remember. 

My second pet, a white puppy named Happy, was run over on the north-and-south street at the right side of the photo.  That street was paved with sand back then.  It didn’t make any difference.

Read More »

I’m sorry. I was supposed to post on Tuesday, but gerbils ate my brain on Tuesday. I got it back from them, and I’m here now. And I’m thinking about how we are all time travelers. Some of my fellow Brains may have heard this rant before: my grandmother Louise, born in 1892, lived to see manned flight, the Bomb (A and H), men walking on the moon, and changes in social custom and mores that left her occasionally gasping to catch up. She was traveling through time at the rate of one day per day, the same rate as the rest of us. It’s only when you stop and look back that you realize how much you’ve lived through, how much time you’ve traveled along.

So: tonight we were watching Zodiac, about, fittingly enough, the Zodiac killer who terrified California in the late 60s to mid-70s. It’s well done and suspenseful, no mean trick when there’s no Hollywood-style triumphant ending to the story. I was particularly taken with the set dressing and costuming, because for the most part it looks the way it was. I’ve been having the same feeling watching Mad Men a new cable series about advertising in the early 60s (actually ‘59, since one of the things the firm is discussing is whether to take Richard Nixon on as a client). I remember a lot less of that time, but small as I was, I was a kid in New York and my father had his office on Madison Avenue (he was not in advertising), and the look and the feel, and the smoke, God the constant wraiths of smoke that haunted every space, is what I remember. Read More »