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Google Web History Knows Your Wants

We all know Google knows everything about us.

How do you feel about that fact?

If you are logged into your Google account, do you know you can have Google show you a Web History of all your Google searches?

It’s a little creepy. It tells you a lot. Google Web History is a newish feature that isn’t getting a lot of play yet.

Google can remember all your web searches and provide context and analysis of who you are and what you needed. Google Web History can provide a scary look back in time over the course of who you are and what your searches want. You need to be logged into your Google account in order for your Web History to be recorded.

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The Longer I Live the Less I Know

When I was 15 years old, my writing mentor and television producer and director and friend Marshall Jamison said during one of our regular, weekly, writing meetings, “The longer I live, the less I know.”

I was rattled because he was 50 years older than I was. I argued with him that I “already knew everything!”

Marshall sat behind his desk at Nebraska ETV and smiled at me.

He nodded as I instructed him the world was “either right or wrong; black or white. What else is there to know?” I think I may have even stood up and put my fists on my hips and leaned into the neutral space dividing us between
his desk.

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School Branding: From Football U. to Ivy League

Whether you realize it or not, your schooling brands you — fairly or not — with its historic reputation in the perception of the mainstream, middling, public mind.

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Helicopter Parents and Militia Mommies

A good friend of mine in Nebraska — who shall remain nameless unless he steps forward here — sent me a great email yesterday full of fascinating thoughts and feelings as well as the following riff on unsavory and selfish parents:

I have personally witnessed and heard stories about minivan moms. These are the women — who have one, maybe two kids — but don’t work regular jobs, and take their kids to school every day. They band together in packs, always drinking their morning coffee in the drop off lanes at school.

On the surface, this of course is a “Leave it to Beaver” scenario. But I have discovered that many are prejudiced against those of us that have jobs, and drop our kids off and go to work. If we are in a hurry, they bitch and honk at you like you ran a red light or cut them off on the interstate. They travel in packs, socialize at the school, and help out at the school like it matters to their son’s or
daughter’s education if they are there or not.

What I have read, later on in life, these parents, usually women but sometimes men, become “helicopter parents.”  Right now in the Lincoln paper, there’s another article how they follow their kids to college and continually intervene in the guidance of their children who need to start thinking and figuring life out on their own.

In trying to be protective and nurturing, these people don’t do justice to their own offspring and get a bad name for themselves. Like an alcoholic or
drug user, they deny a problem exists. Some of these parents I have run across at the elementary level are down right nasty to deal with.

Have you heard of the “Helicopter Parents” phenomenon before?

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Underage Backstage at Barrymore’s Bar

Barrymore’s Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska is unique. It is located in the backstage area of what used to be the Stuart Theatre. You enter the bar through an alley. The bar entrance was the performer’s stage door when the theatre opened in 1929.

Barrymore’s was always dark and musky and smelling of sawdust and rope. The Stuart theatre is still a performance space with seats and a stage and on the other side of the fire curtain remains Barrymore’s — still backstage — and still thriving with life and ambition and still giving off a strange ambience of being someplace you don’t belong but were always meant to be in the end.

Barrymore’s is where the radio people I used to work with would hang out before, during and after work because the station was on the eighth floor of the same building. If I joined them during the day I always had a pop while those around me would slowly make their way into the slosh. One day my friends and I were hanging out downtown after school and we decided to go into Barrymore’s.

Barrymore’s was an upper class bar. It wasn’t like the bar troughs clotted along downtown where University of Nebraska-Lincoln students would head for the cheapest buzz they could find. The five of us sat down together at a tiny round table. The waitress came over and smiled and asked what we were drinking as she placed a cocktail napkin before each of us. She said drinking in such a way we knew she mean alcohol and not pop or water.

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Neighbor in the Hood

We don’t have a washing machine or dryer in our apartment building so every week I drop off our dirty laundry at the corner Laundromat for washing. In our Jersey City neighborhood paying someone else to wash and dry your clothes actually costs less than doing it all yourself in Manhattan. 

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Monarch of the Plains

Growing up in Nebraska can be a lonely and hard thing. Earth and sky are elements made for crushing. Each Nebraska horizon beyond the urban core presents only two images you learn early to avoid and they are both found on the visceral level where trembling and genetics meet blood creating the canvas of dreams and the kindling of hope: Bunches of blue sky crouch and stretch above just out of reach, teasing you over and around in what you imagine the ocean must look and feel like; maturity comes in dry pieces you kick and hold in your hand as dust while down beneath your boots rusty slivers of infertile earth scatter telling of dreams ending in sharp shards and hope dead and undone by a landscape that forgives nothing but rain.

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