CommemoraTees

Memories found in a drawer of faded, worn-out, souvenir T-shirts:

• GR4 --- bearing the logo of the 1977 General Relativity conference (#4) held at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada ... which four foolish physics grad students (Yekta Gürsel, Carl Caves, Rich Flammang, and I) trekked to and returned from via an irrationally long cross-country drive ... stopping along the way to see and hike in in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Zion and Arches National Monuments, Canyon de Chelley, and of course the Grand Canyon ... and bringing back photos showing me at Four Corners but not straddling four states, and at the Continental Divide but not astride the line
• Gravitational Radiation --- ripples in spacetime symbolic of the 1978 conference sponsored by Battelle Memorial Institute and held in Seattle, Washington ... bunk beds in the university dorm, reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, breakfast with intense young astronomers, jogging around campus in the drizzle ... and where I first heard the metaphor "ideology of the cancer cell" in a commentary on senseless growth by a young German physicist whose name now escapes me (Peter? ... see ^zhurnal 19 May 1999)
• Bionic Toad --- a ~1979 Creative Computing line drawing in mechanimal style ... from one of the early (now defunct) computer hobbyist 'zines where I published a few articles (see ^zhurnal 23 May 2000)
• Penguin Love --- an inscrutable Japanese design ... from a ~1984 business trip, bringing back images of Tokyo subway crowds, the Akihabara, wonderful hole-in-the-wall noodle shops, and the verdant Imperial Palace grounds at a time when land prices made it in theory worth roughly as much as the entire state of California
• Sushi --- a cute Kliban cat graphic ... picked up in Hawaii ~1986 ... shave-ice stalls, comfortably warm drizzles during long walks, the Honolulu public library and university campus, wading in the warm Pacific, and US national defense as symbolized in the form of multiple military golf courses along Waikiki Beach
• Tuesday, April 24, 2001 at 05:47:51 (EDT) = Datetag20010424

TopicPersonalHistory

(correlates: ThanksAndAcknowledgements2, EquationsAndReality, TheCancerIdeology, ...)