Kris tagged me. Here are five things you might not know about me:
1. I hate chain letters. This one is harmless, but it’s amazing how chain letter style scams crop up again and again, and people who ought to know better fall for them. I particularly remember one called “The Circle of Gold“, which went around in New Age circles in the late 70s. It was amazing how many people fell for it because it was wrapped in New Age language. As Freeman Dyson once said, “We need a department of homeland arithmetic!” Even though, as Kris said, this one actually generates interesting social network information, I’m still of two minds about continuing it. Well one, so I blogtag no one in turn. (But if I did, I’d tag Dale Dougherty, Larry Wall, Jeff Jonas, Matt Webb, and Saul Griffith.)
2. As you might guess from the entry above, I began my career far from the computer industry. I taught my first Esalen workshop at the age of 18, but quit by my mid-20s and started working on computer documentation because I didn’t like the idea of making my living on something as personal as people’s psychological and spiritual growth.
3. I have six brothers and sisters, and my mother has a total of 42 grandchildren. One of my brothers has twelve children! We’re all very much still in touch, despite the very different paths our lives have taken. We had a big family reunion in Ireland for my mother’s 80th birthday. My father is buried in Aghadoe cemetery above the beautiful lakes of Killarney, in a family grave that my brothers and I filled in ourselves, encountering the bones of our ancestors along the way.
4. My wife Christina is a playwright. After many years of writing, she finally started producing her own work. The set for her last play, Skeleton Woman, was mostly built with materials that she and I scrounged from the beach, including an amazing prow of a ruined boat that we found on the beach in Berkeley.
5. One of my hobbies is reading old books that were once bestsellers but are now largely forgotten. The true “classics” are timeless, but the next tier down is precious precisely because they are time-bound, and often give more peculiar insights into the mores of the day. I started this hobby on a rainy day when a used bookshop was going out of business. They were putting their remaining stock out on the street, and I couldn’t let the books be destroyed, so I took them home, thinking that someone would enjoy them. That person turned out to be me. My latest find, Upton Sinclair‘s Lanny Budd novels, which give an amazing birds-eye view of America’s history during the two world wars.