Category Archives: Personal History

New Jersey Steve Mays

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I received a cryptic overnight email that simply asked, "How much for it?" It was signed 'Steve Mays.' At first I thought it was one of the frequent reminders I email myself. But then I noticed the email was different.

Oh. It must be Steve Mays (West), the Seattle attorney who owns the domain SteveMays.com. He's decided to sell the domain? That seemed unlikely, so I pinged back:

"Nope…. Steve Mays from New Jersey. I did a whois on smays.com and found this e-mail address. Let me know of a price that would interest you. I should say now I'm not willing to pay more then 50 bucks for it. I don't think you'll let it go for that much, but let me know."

I hope to learn more about New Jersey Steve Mays. Why, for example, does he (sort of) want to purchase smays.com. Does he blog or have an online business.
If he's poked around here he knows I've been at this address since February, 2002. Why would I move for $50?

I might not hear back from NJSM. I responded –nicely, I hope– that I wouldn't sell smays.com for $100K. Not sure I can explain why. This little blog doesn't make me a dime. And I could pack up and move to www.DigitalLoveMachine.com (which appears to be available) and some of you would find me again. But it wouldn't be the same.

If New Jersey Steve is reading this, I hope he gets back to me because I'd like to learn more about him and his online plans. Maybe an interview?

PS for Steve Mays West: I notice your site appers to be down. Hope all is well.

The photography of Matthew Howard

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Matt Howard is a talented photographer in Kennett, MO (my home town). Matt’s day job is personal trainer so I guess he’s technically an amateur but certainly in the best sense of that word. I stumbled onto Matt’s flickr page recently and was immediately taken with his haunting (for me) images of the flat, empty fields I remember growing up. I got him on the phone for a brief (15 min) chat this afternoon during which he explained his passion for photography started with a book rather than a camera.

AUDIO: Interview with Matt Howard 15 min MP3

 

R.I.P. Whitey

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Richard Whitehorn died last week. Following a long slug-fest with cancer. Richard was just a year ahead of me in school and we weren’t close growing up. But I have lots of memories of him.

I don’t know if Richard was a bully or I was just intimidated by him. But he projected a kind of tough guy image. He and his BFF Tommy Crunk were like Butch and Sundance, tooling around town in Whitey’s ’57 Chevy. When the Honda motorcycle craze hit, Crunk and Whitey were among the first to own them. Yes, they were dashing.

One hot summer night during high school, my friends and I pooled our money and gave it to Whitey to buy us the beer we were not quite old enough to purchase ourselves. We also gave him a detailed list of what each of us wanted. He returned with a case of Champagne Velvet. Nasty stuff that was much cheaper. (“You guys had just enough money.”) A really bad guy would have just taken our money. Whitey gave us beer and a little lesson in free enterprise.

As an adult, Richard (I don’t know if anyone still called him Whitey by then) became a crop duster. Hard to imagine a more fitting occupation. Our friend Pam attended Richard’s funeral this past  weekend in Kennett.

“It was sad as hell. They had visitation starting at 11:00 and a graveside service at 2:00.  The funeral was over, the preacher had just said “amen” and closed the Bible when I heard someone say “here they come” and I wondered, who’s coming? I looked in the direction I heard some noise and here came 3 Pawnee crop dusters in formation, streaming smoke like they were Blue Angels, tree top high right over the funeral tent. Once past the left and right planes peeled off and the middle plane pulled up. I think everyone lost it at that point.”

To which Richard would have growled, “What are you pussies crying about?”

Seven Years Before the Blog

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Every year on this date I pause to recall that it was way back in 2002 that I began blogging. Like many others, I was posting little rants on my website before we had the tools and the name, but this is the date I started “writing some stuff down.”

That post was a long quote from Carl Hiaasen’s novel, Basket Case. He described two types of journalists and alluded to the “slow-strangling dailies,” a number of which have finally strangled in the last year or so.

On the 4th anniversary of this blog I met some friends and had four beers. I’m afraid 7 beers would put me out of commission for several days, so we won’t do that.

Another thing I used to do was browse back through the earlier posts but with 4,000+ that is no longer practical. So this post will serve as another scratch on blog wall.