Audio Chimera

The platonic "love story" of a young woman who I met, had a pretend romantic relationship with (the campers expected no less!), lost, refound, and lost again. It's interesting how paths cross and criss-cross in a lifetime, and how we often hope the cross again.

BIG DATA is watching us, but we don't know why. But we have our suspicions, and it's not to make better products and services for us. Can anyone truly learn anything from all the quantitative data that is being collected? Maybe we need to talk about Quality in Life, stop grazing art, and stop photographing the roses soo we can smell them.

This episode is perhaps more of an editorial that a memory about higher education. I am unsure why education is under attack, unless there is some nefarious plan afoot. For me, my education improved my life immensely, and allowed me to be successful in life beyond my original dreams.

Life allows for revelations to occur from time to time. A fever once helped me have a revelation about GIlligan's Island. I had a life-changing revelation when I discovered GarageBand; my longtime search a composer to create music for my songs suddenly became me, thanks to loops! I include three of my revelation-related spoken word pieces, "I, Prometheus," "So Relaxed," and &qu...

My wife and I have had some very non-traditional moments in our life together, even when pursuing very traditional paths. A case in point was our wedding. For years, I have threatened to write a play about that weekend; here are some glimpses into some of the odder moments of our wedding.

I really do enjoy technology. Without it, I wouldn't be writing this paragraph on my laptop, about to upload a podcast episode to the web. And a thousand other things we all do on a daily basis. But always nagging me is the thought, what if the cloud, or worse, the grid, goes down? How will we all cope?

Commercials and advertisements have been with us for a long time, and follow us wherever we go. Sometimes they are targeted at us as individuals--and what could be more annoying? We used to accept them as a necessary evil, but is that attitude necessary anymore?

My love of progressive rock is well known; I currently listen to practically nothing else in my day-to-day. And a lot of what I occasionally hear (by accident, or passing by with loud speakers in a car on the road) I don''t care for. But I think whatever you like is fine, because that's your thing. And I hate it when someone tries to pass judgement on music they just don't like. Dude, get over you...

A few years back, I wrote a memoir called Immaculate Misconceptions: Tales from Catholic School . This episode contains some material from that volume, as well as a few additional stories.

We often learn how to treat others through our personal experiences; we don't want to put someone through what we had been through. This is evident in the way I approach actors when I direct. And sometimes those actors, they just confound me!

In Academia and Higher Ed, you expect to jump through a series of hoops when interviewing for a position. An interview can involve multiple days, many discussions, and several meals (and if you are lucky, the food is good at least). Some of my interviews left me checking right and left for Rod Serling to see if he was about to narrate the experience.

I wrote much of this podcast at a conference in Las Vegas, which was held at a major casino resort hotel. While there, my toilet backed up twice in my hotel room—you know, when you pull a handle in Vegas you expect to win, but for me, with every flush, well, that was where the real gambling happened. And that's the way it is with a lot of travel--you throw the dice and hope for the best!

When people say TMI, they generally mean, “too much information!” But when I hear that phrase I flash back to March 1979. I remember vividly hearing the fear in a woman's voice on the phone, asking if I thought she should evacuate the area and take her baby to safety. We'd received no orders to evacuate but how could I, a young DJ, tell her to just sit tight if she was so panicked?

In my life I have spent many hours listening to music, as many of us have. My experiences began with an old Japanese-made AM transistor radio (that still works!) and continue in the digital realm--though I still have my original vinyl. Can't see surrendering them just yet!

The easiest way to put it is, "I do believe in ghosts!" I have experienced strange sensations in various locations that suggests that spirits do exist and can remain or haunt a place. But none of my pre-disposed beliefs prepared me for the moment when someone seemed to be possessed by an evil spirit right in front of me!

It turns out, my affinity for the Victorian era fed into a desire to get into Steampunk. And then I even created my own costume, and even entered my first costume contest at the age of 59. And the 10 year-old boy who lives inside me? He tried to stop me. Listen in and find out if he succeeded.

People in York, PA still talk about those days. The unrest happening around the country came to us. Fires, shooting, National Guard...how quickly a place can devolve into a war zone. And for what--ridiculous outmoded ideas that we are somehow so different. Let's take another, closer, better look at others.

I attended the University of California, Berkeley for my PhD. Besides a solid education (and some real academic cred), I retained many memories of my time there--street people, social protests, and wild times.

Yes, Thom McAn and the Pneumatic Tubes sounds like a band. What it was, however, was a fun workday. This is what happens when the manager of a shoe store decided to take a young employee in a tour of the building to check out the old pneumatic tube system. And no, that's not a euphemism. That's exactly what happened.

Coffee beans and human beans were meant to be the best of friends! While I had long flirted with the effects of caffeine in soft drinks, it wasn't until coffee that I truly solidified my relationship with the Bean. Note that I take my title from Stanislavsky's work, "My Life in Art," but what life is there without caffeine??

When you find love, it can be amazing. When your love then no longer cares, it can be devastating. Why did this delightful and intelligent young woman think I want to shackle her in marriage, to be my "Chief Cook, Bottle Washer and Baby Machine," when we hadn't even had our second date yet?

In 1972, my city experienced flooding from Hurricane Agnes. Hardly as devastating as more recent storms (Katrina, etc.), for me personally it was quite the upheaval. Inches of water in the basement, a day of bailing, news of flooding up and down the Susquehanna River. These events stay with you.

Water conservation! New topic? No, I figured out that it was a good idea back in 1966. My city was experiencing a drought, and behaviors that started then are still with me today—in case we have more problems with water. And, with global climate change, that seems like it just might be an important issue...

The Key Theatre was a second-run movie theatre in Hazleton, PA. For $1 you could see movies that you had missed not that long before. It was a great time--but what added to the experience was trying to decipher the marquee. With missing letters, sometimes titles were difficult to figure out, when they weren't downright incendiary!

They say you can't go home again. It's worse when you go back to visit somewhere and your favorite place to hang out is no more. This happened to me with Bernie's Bagels, where I spent many...okay, let's say interesting hours.