May 19, 2026 Busy weekend! We said goodbye to a visiting friend from Oklahoma on Friday, and by Sunday we were at the Detroit Masonic Temple for “Candlelight: 90s Hip-Hop on Strings,” which was wonderfully fun and intimate in the smaller auditorium. The musicians were the Kalkaska String Quartet, based here in Michigan. Joe Jackson…
May 5, 2026 Last week I had an observation related to music and organizational leadership. I love it when my diverse interests come together! As I’m fond of pointing out how creative solutions come from diverse thinking, I was recently listening to Billy Corgan’s podcast “The Magnificent Others,” where his guest was guitarist Jeff “Skunk”…
April 10,2026 The Internet can be the “back catalog” of our history. Let me explain. One of the cool things about our Internet-connected world is that it can change our perceptions and beliefs about the world around us. Not in a government-controlled, PR-massaged kind of way — that happens too much already — but in…
“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.” – Arthur C. Clarke Translation: Greetings from the Land of the Anishinaabe, who are comprised of the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa),…
February 23, 2026 Winter in Michigan has a way of celebrating itself, especially when the Olympics are on and every other athlete seems to have trained within an hour of your house. But it wasn’t the medal count that stopped me in my tracks—it was a Starbucks ad. One musical choice, and suddenly I wasn’t…
January 18, 2026 After a quarter-century (!) we recently sold our home in Tulsa. In 2000, we had just returned to Tulsa from West Seattle, bringing a mess of plants and bulbs. Some things survived (rosemary, oriental “stargazer” lilies) and some things didn’t (chocolate cosmos). Other things we bought over the years (a 20-year-old Meyer…
December 27, 2025 I can think of lots of examples when I have opened up a device to find elegant design embedded within. My espresso machine, for example. The Italian designers working in the 1960s and 70s did not have the luxury of computers or integrated circuits, so they built cool little things like flowmeters…
September 4, 2025 I’ll admit it: I’m a Star Trek fan. But not a hardcore, “go to the conventions” style fan. Over the years, I’ve watched The Original Series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), a bit of Voyager, Discovery, and lately, Enterprise. Never DS9, which is a flaw in me, I’ve been told. Thanks to…
August 4, 2025 Recently, I penned an opinion piece in the Tulsa World on the ways in which America is throwing away one of its most cost-effective methods of persuasion on the world stage: soft power. The Tulsa World version (limited to 600 words) is here. This came from a discussion I had with my…
August 5, 2025 In the early days of the Internet, I was helping my friend Steve Jones do research on a book that grew to be “The Internet for Educators and Homeschoolers.” One of the things that came out back then was all the ways groups were trying to solve “last mile” problems, and in…