I used to dread it when my wealthy aunt dragged out the magic lantern, put up the screen and proceeded to torture us youngsters (and I am sure our less-traveled parents) with fuzzy slides and stilted stories about her encounters with the pigeon pocked monuments of Europe. Now, thanks to the internet, we have tedium on demand...or as it is on demand and we might not choose to demand it, we can choose spontaneity and entertainment instead. And that fun, these days, could just come from the little device that has become our love it/hate it sidekick, our mobile phones.
My father was a do-it-yourselfer, a master carpenter probably better than Jesus as the Son-of-God's carpentry skills were never well documented (but I'm sure the SOG had more important things to do than building bird houses). I didn't take after either one. My woodworking was plagued by bent over nails and my middle school shop teacher, a large ruddy man bursting with blood pressure, said I did rivits like “a girl.”
But the Maker Faire , sort of a Burning Man meets Martha Stewart affair, grabbed what was left of the little boy in my soul, the urge to build a Go Cart or blow up the neighbor's garbage can. This was not a hangout for the tough-as-nails guys who hang out in the tool department of Home Depot. Here the muse was as important as the monkey wrench.
Download MP4 (iPod) I am headed to Sri Lanka next week and asked a mutual friend of mine and the late Arthur C. Clarke if it would be possible pay Clarke a visit. "I'll try, but he is very weak", was the reply. Clarke, of course, passed away yesterday. I spent a day in 1994 exploring the sandbox that is his mind while working on a documentary on the future of travel.
Would you really like to be shot into space? Honest, would you take pleasure in being stuffed in an unwieldy suit (with a diaper no less), enduring cookie-tossing, face-contorting g-forces just on the outside chance that you might “touch the face of God?” I once asked astronaut Buzz Aldrin if there was one peak experience -- something perhaps spiritual -- that would justify anyone wanting to endure this rigmarole. “It makes a helluva story at a cocktail party,” he replied. The recent press-conference collapse of Anousheh Ansari, the latest “tourist” astronaut, alerted me to the fact that space travel is not a stroll around the Tuilleries. But then we live in the land of the brave, the home of the free-spender, the up Everest without oxygen crowd.
No, this is not the work of some unknown abstract impressionist. Underneath the pattern is an aerial map of San Francisco Bay and the lines represent a day of air traffic to and from San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose airports. The different colors represent arrivals and departures by airport. (Courtesy of Michael McCarron, San Francisco Airport)
