Nature makes music—the wind, the waves, the rain, the rustle of leaves, the creak and complaint of trees. The human impulse to transform these sounds into something that might be called Automatic Art spawned the…
Posts published in “Essays”
Since Anderson Valley is a small place (population around 3,000), the odds of knowing, or at least knowing of someone who dies in the Valley is fairly high. Valley residents tend to be in groups…
Supervisor Maureen Mulheren (Facebook video, Wednesday, October 29, 2025): “I have been thinking a lot about the way that elected officials… people try to pigeon hole them into one specific point. The one that I…
The 19th century developed industrial-aesthetic machinery to keep women who harbored public musical aspirations in their place—off the concert stage and in the home. One of the most potent of these tools was the printed…
I turned 84 today and created The Fuck-it List™. You know, of course, about the Bucket List – things you hope to do before you die. The Fuck-it List™ is for things you've been hoping…
The behavior of nations or groups of people can be controlled by policy objectives, or by prophecy and religion, and when the two combine, their joint power increases greatly. The Ayatollah Khomenei once commented that…
The Christianization of Scandinavia took place over a few hundred years and was completed by the early 12th century thanks to Sigurd the Crusader, the Norwegian king who subjugated the intransigent pagans of southern Sweden…
Question: Is media-generated fear of AI warranted? For 25 years the technowizards at Goggle haven’t been able to tame the Spelchuck monster from scrambling real words into wrong words and / or imaginary ones. It…