News & Opinion

The Internet is still in its infancy. We haven’t even reached Web 3.0 yet, so just imagine what Web 10.0 will look like. Crowdsourcing will be a huge part of what comes next. I flew back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas recently, and I’m beginning to think there will be no more secrets. There are even shirts that say “What happens in Vegas, stays on Facebook and Twitter forever.” I just ordered a new video camera that you wear on your ear like a Bluetooth headset. It’s uploading video constantly. I think a lot of people will wear jewelry that records every minute of their lives and uploads it to the cloud.

I. The Vonneguts were here (and still are). The new Kurt Vonnegut mural along Mass Ave has made the likeness of Indy’s most famous author a permanent fixture of the cityscape. And the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, opened in 2011, allows visitors to lay fingers on the very typewriter keys the giant once tapped (and […]

I recently turned 51 and spent some time on my birthday thinking about the habits I’ve cultivated over the years that have enhanced my life. Probably the most useful habit has been developing a heroic list of prejudices. I’ve made up my mind about a lot of things and am not likely to change it in the 24.1 years the government tells me I have left. These prejudices have been formed after much experience, save me time and trouble, and have been proven right time and again.

I miss the phone book. A lot. I realize this makes me sound like Andy Rooney, who proclaimed everything was better the way it used to be, but I am who I am. Old—not Andy Rooney old, at the time of his death, but up there. Set in my ways. Resistant to change. For as long as I can remember, I’ve kept two phone books—the white and yellow pages—in my bottom desk drawer, the one deep enough to accommodate the weight without rolling off its hinges.

I have not been to my favorite restaurant in, oh, 20 years or so. Too long, I know. Just haven’t been in that part of Virginia. But I remember the eatery as vividly as anything else from the early 1990s.

Last summer, when family troubles landed me down in the dumps, I decided I should have a little joy in my life. I got an urge, not unlike the longing a woman gets when it’s time for another child: that stirring deep inside that is at first un-recognizable but slowly gels into actual thought, and, finally, action. I wanted—no, needed—another cat to take the place of my beloved Scooter, who died, cancer-ridden, deaf, and blind, at the age of 21.

Every now and then, I think how better off America would be if we had a dictator instead of a president. I realize the nations of the world are shedding their dictators right and left, but a first-class dictator can work wonders for a country, cutting through the red tape, deporting annoying people, and eliminating the mess and expense of regular elections.

“I told my daughter, Angie, ‘I wish everybody would stop talking about the officer, because we don’t know whose lungs these are,” says Cathy Lewis.

“It’s a tough situation for Peyton. He’s not used to being in this situation. We rode the elevator together after the Tampa Bay game, and I told him he has to cover himself with optimism. He knows he can’t will his way through this. It’s not like having a broken leg, and if he were tough enough, he could play through it. It’s not that kind of injury. And the number of years he has left is unknown. He’s 35. You hope that he can play until 38, 39, 40.”

It is difficult to be objective about someone you’ve known all your life, but allow me to relate, in as dispassionate a manner as possible, my well-founded suspicions of Santa Claus. From the photographic evidence available, it appears we first met when I was 5 years old. The encounter took place on the square of my hometown, in front of the Danville State Bank, in early December of 1966. Though he introduced himself as Santa Claus from the North Pole, I would later learn his real name was Vernon McClure, and that when he was not engaged in identity theft, he operated the town’s dime store. Deception is not the basis for a positive relationship, so Santa and I were off on the wrong foot from the get-go. I would soon discover  that Mr. McClure falsified his identity in order to generate business for his dime store, a violation of the public trust from which I have still not recovered.

Thirty years ago, Lady Di married Prince Charles, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake were born, and gas cost $1.25 a gallon. That same year, Dallas was the top TV show, President Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, and somebody introduced the term “Internet.”

Dear Governor Daniels,

On March 9, 1922, the writer E.B. White, unemployed and with few prospects, packed a Model T Ford and drove across America, reaching Seattle in mid-September. He stuck mainly to roads, except in the prairie states where roads were not yet built; there he took to the open fields. He did this before any reliable system of support—gas stations, hotels, restaurants, and road signs—had been established. Twenty-nine years later, Holiday magazine asked White to make the drive again, writing essays about America along the way. He made it as far as Galeton, Pennsylvania, before turning back, disenchanted and missing his wife. Holiday went to Plan B, which was John Steinbeck, who took the trip in 1960 with his poodle and wrote Travels with Charley.

“Zach is the model of a modern LGBT candidate,” says one political observer. “He has done it all on his own. He didn’t wait for the party boss to tell him it was okay.”

The American Planning Association has confirmed something that we at IM have known for years—nearly 35 years, in fact.