Shot-Gun Buzz Aldrin: "Good Luck, Mr. Armstrong!"

All bid fond adieu to Neil Armstrong today in a solemn and private Ohio ceremony - our dignified American hero and first man to set foot on the moon.  No greater glory than this moment of human achievement.  I never met Neil...

Buzz, Buzz and BEYOND

But I did meet Buzz Aldrin! 

My team interviewed him for the Discovery Channel CD-ROM "Beyond Planet Earth" in 1992 and I got to know just what a hard-charging self-promoter this gent was.  We parked him in the studio at Capitol Video on Wisconsin Ave., and he delivered the goods.

Buzz: Moon as Steppingstone to Fame

He did lots of work for Discovery Channel in the early years, and on and on - appearing on-air, on the road, and in special events when we had space-theme programming to sell.

As gracious and reserved as small-step Neil was, that's how eager to make a giant leap for the limelight was ol' Buzz.  Since we were always looking for publicity, it suited us just fine.  Still, when I spoke with him, it seemed almost as though Buzz wanted us to forget that Neil had been down the steps ahead of him.

He'd ridden in the side-car, and it bugged him no end.

So I never met Neil, although when my friend David pointed out Neil's house up the block from his own in Spring Valley, DC to me, we stood in the road and gaped.  Like you and everybody else, I kept a scrapbook, drank Tang and watched TV rapt all night in July, 1969 as Apollo 11 touched down.

The Armstrong family has asked us all - everyone who looks up to the sky to dream, to wonder, or to fall in love - to peek at tonight's Blue Moon and think of Neil.  I will see you there.

"Ad Astra Per Aspera"

The eulogy that wasn't...

The legacy we love to believe...

And Buzz: Keep On Truckin' !

Titanic Discoverer Bob Ballard Asked ME For Directions...

Captain Fantastic, Bob Ballard

For a guy who found a needle in a haystack, a mile below the surface and hundreds of miles out in the dark and desolate northern Atlantic ocean, Bob Ballard was clueless on land.

The Titanic went down 100 years ago tonight.  Yours truly was "present" - on the very fringes - at its rediscovery in 1986 and this was a huge, huge thrill!  I was working at National Geographic Television while Ballard's research and exploration grant was in effect, and during 1984 and 1985 we'd get news of hopeful progress that Captain Ballard and his crew were zeroing in - "vectoring" - and that the discovery was close, close, close at hand.  We had film coverage on board, in case he struck gold.

Ballard: "The actual ship was much, much bigger than this!"

The Holy Grail.  Noah's Ark.  The Titanic.  In 20th Century popular ambition, no lost object loomed larger, nor seemed more of an impossible dream.  In all the vast, deep sea, could one man and his team possibly find something so elusive?  The mind boggled to imagine it.

Well, you know the rest: the discovery, later the romantic movie.  In between Bob Ballard became popularized as a hero on par with Edmund Hillary and Howard Carter.  He went on to locate the Bismarck, and to found the Jason project that has educated and engaged thousands and thousands of schoolchildren to be budding scientists and researchers.

We rushed our National Geographic EXPLORER Special onto the air in December 1986 and earned the highest-ever ratings for a basic-cable TV show, with 1 in 8 Americans tuning in that Sunday night.  Later we hired Bob to host National Geographic EXPLORER and he did pretty well for himself - handled the on-air work with charisma for a few seasons, and ended up marrying a young colleague of mine.  Ultimately popularized by James Cameron and depicted by Bill Paxton in the blockbuster "Titanic," Bob is now a permanent icon of Neil Armstrong magnitude.

So, the funny thing was, one sunny day in the summer of 1987 when my UCSB '81 fiancee and I were knocking around Montecito in Santa Barbara, a block inland from the beautiful Biltmore Hotel near El Cabrillo and Channel Drive, a car pulled up, rolled down the window, and a friendly voice said "Hey, can you tell me how to get to Summerland from here?"

My companion yelled at him "Hey! You're Bob Ballard!! We work for Tim Kelly!!"  Immediate recognition (Tim was the leader of NG TV who had flown the edited Titanic show in his hands, via helicopter, to WTBS to make air).  We stood in the street shooting the breeze, recalling the craziness of the previous year's TV production, talking about this or that project that he was working on either at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute or as a National Geographic "Explorer-In-Residence," and eventually sending him on his way.

Where Am I?  ... And Where's That Darn Ship?

Now, get this: Summerland was about two miles south of where we stood, and on the main road toward Carpinteria and Ventura.  Nobody leaving Santa Barbara bound for LA could get far without immediately seeing signs for Summerland.  And here's the funny thing: much later I learned that among Bob's distinguished credentials he held a dual degree in Chemistry and Marine Biology from UCSB, so he had lived right there in beautiful Isla Vista for four years (he'd also been an ROTC student).

So it's inexplicable to me how a master-class navigator could have been so befuddled.  But we were happy to correct his course, of course, and did see a good bit more of him in his EXPLORER-hosting days from 1989-1991.  A sharp, driven guy with absolute leadership class, who dreams big and is never averse to being in the spotlight.

Oed und leer das meer!

One More Degree from Breitbart: On-Site with Soledad O'Brien

Up the Down Staircase/In Thru Out Door

She looks more than a bit shrill, shilling for the President on CNN last night, over the BreitbartTV release of Vetting, part I (of ___n.?)

. . . but in 1997-1998 she was a cute and perky hostess of a wacky show on new cable network ZDTV (later TechTV; later than that: G4).

Youthful Indiscretion

The show was called The Site, and was conceived to be a little bit like the TV equivalent of then-popular Yahoo! Internet Life magazine.  Our Soledad led the microscopic but hyped-up audience through a travelogue of sorts: a tour and review of neat websites.

Lordy, How We've Grown

It was my good fortune to work with the ZDTV-ers to launch and distribute the channel.  In the early days we spent a lot of time working and hanging out in the cool studio in San Francisco.  The internet was hot, The Site was new, and Up and Down the Spiral Staircase we ran, like giddy schoolkids.

Soledad and I were introduced and she won me over with her friendly smile, and funny name.

We didn't know each other well, nor for long, but I still perk up when I see her and I imagine she would make a worthy sparring partner.

The CNN implosion over the Breitbart "Vetting" video is striking - because she's usually a very good feature reporter.

Oh well!

Drinking with Mad Scientist Dean Kamen

Dean & his Segway

May, 2007 (Chicago):  NCIIA, a great organization that encourages technology entrepreneurship by preparing engineering concepts incubated on the campuses to launch, was at the Chicago Art Museum to participate in presentation of the Lemelson-MIT "EurekaFest" Awards to technology innovators.  I was part of the scene and our patron, the Lemelson Foundation, had invited an impressive guest-list.  Included was the great but enigmatic Dean Kamen - originator of the FIRST competition (similar to NCIIA's work, but targeted at high school age science whiz-kids) and inventor of numerous products including the Segway.

Father Jack had a bent for the dramatic

I was cutting through the crowd with a glass of fine red wine when I spotted the diminutive Kamen, clad in trademark denim work shirt and pants.  Strode right up and introduced myself - he certainly knew of NCIIA and I also had a personal card to play: My mother-in-law and her late husband had owned a vacation home on the perimeter of StoneBridge Golf & Country Club in  Boca in the 1980's-90's.  Their next door neighbors and friends were Dean's parents, Jack and Evelyn.

Jack had been an illustrator for Weird Science,  Tales from the Crypt, and MAD Magazine in the 1960's.

Well, Dean and I shot the breeze for a bit; he had mixed memories of Boca Raton and obviously preferred the inventor's bench and the life of the mind to life on the golf course.  Dean was a bit of a nebbish - but he's the awesome nebbish who invented the Segway!  He seemed interested in my tales of Discovery Channel's groundbreaking Australian co-pro "Beyond 2000" and two years later he would combine with Discovery's Planet Green network to create the series "Dean of Invention."

Valpo "Reverser"

We saw the awards given out, and the wine bottles cleared away.  Next morning, early, I drove into Indiana to pay a visit to the Valparaiso U. engineering department and survey their Tech. Entrepreneurship program.

Toward the end of the tour, Dr. Doug Tougaw stunned me with a visit to the lab where his senior class quirky cap-stoners had reverse-engineered a Segway to build a clone from scratch, "for less than $1,800!"  Doug had his guys fire that thang up and give it a go.

Total boldness: the vehicle wheeled and dealed.

Innovation Run Wild

I marveled, and later that evening wrote to my new friend Dean, alerting him to the work of these enterprising engineers.

I imagined he might take an interest in the program, or at least offer a word of encouragement.  However, he never acknowledged my note, nor our conversation.  Oh well.

... The great screenplay "The A-Rabs Are Coming! The A-Rabs Are Coming!"  includes a magnificent scene with a pair of octogenarian blue-bloods cutting figure eights in the driveway to their Nantucket manse on a pair of birthday Segways.  Thank you, Dean Kamen!  Thank you.

Jobs for One and All - Walter Isaacson in Silicon Valley

Steve Jobs - Genius

Lots of hooting and hollering today about the new Steve Jobs biography.  I can't wait to read it!

Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson (he's also written bio's of Ben Franklin and Al Einstein) is a fixture of the American literary-intellectual firmament.  Within Time Inc. he helmed TIME Magazine and later CNN; more recently he's been head of the prestigious Aspen Institute.

"The Thinker" - Stanford's Cantor Arts Center

In the autumn of 1994 while he was "Editor of New Media" (a passing fancy) at TIME, Walt was invited to appear on the Stanford University campus for Della Van Heyst's vaunted Stanford Publishing Seminar (Della happened to be romancing FORTUNE Magazine, at the TIME).  I too was invited to join the same panel.

A fresh-faced Cardinal MBA student picked me up at SFO, whisked me to the campus and I wandered in the Rodin sculpture garden - to which I would return in 1997 - before joining the gang for a cookout preceding the evening program.  Walt appeared at the dais with tech reporter/author Kara Swisher, WSJ tech reviewer Walt Mossberg, and me - then Publisher of Discovery Channel Multimedia.

Our most interesting exchange that night, prompted by my observation during discussion of the future of books and magazines, concerned whether writing for interactive media was best and most creatively accomplished 'from whole cloth,' versus when adapted from literary source material.

One half of this Hollywood dichotomy is "Best Writing - Original Screenplay" (in 2011, David Seidler for The King's Speech) - from 1976 to 1978, in a fit of disclosure, the Academy formally referred to this category as "Screenplay written directly for the Screen - Based on factual material or on story material not previously published or produced").  The flip side of course is the Oscar for "Best Writing - Adapted Screenplay" (Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network - from Ben Mezrich's Accidental Billionaires).

Birches not Aspens - Walt Isaacson

At the time I was trying to negotiate a license with Warner Brothers for a CD-ROM tie-in with the upcoming Twister film, and separately (personally) developing a screenplay concept: a re-make of a film that had originally been produced in the mid-60's based on a 1950's Cold War novel. As he was then a Time-Warner executive-suite guy, I drew Walter out on the development processes at HBO and Silver Screen Partners.

I got the T-shirt...

The earnest Stanford kids pursued the thread, lobbing in some excellent comments and questions.

Walter was a nice guy - made some trenchant observations in his interesting New Orleans accent that is bent a bit conspicuously to the Brahmin by time spent in Cambridge.  He came off as pompous, I then thought . . . but not without solid justification, I now think!

Isaacson and I later shared the panel dais again in April, 1995 at the Software Publishers' Association confab in Atlanta.  More of the same, and a lot of fun!

Walt definitely got the big "get" with this book from Simon & Schuster.  Here's an excellent NPR story and interview from Fresh Air.  At this moment when "jobs" are the biggest issue of the election season, and "Jobs" the departing icon of American ingenuity and growth, can the biography fail to captivate?

  I think not !!

Steve Jobs - Zen and the Art of Innovation

In Orbit with John Glenn

Fleeting or harrowing? Take your pick:

In 1966, my father arrived home breathless one evening for dinner, to share the story that he'd just met a spaceman!  Evidently, on entering the stately front door of the Lord Jeffery Amherst Inn (then "A Treadway Resort") on the town common in Amherst that day, whom did he meet exiting the lobby with suitcase in hand?  American hero John Glenn.  The meet-up at the Lord Jeff was a fleeting moment, made smooth by my father speaking up "Hello, Mr. Glenn! May I get that door for you?" as he welcomed the spaceman.  "Thank you," said our visiting astronaut.

Flash forward to 2004:

Back to the Beach: In Orbit Again

Semper Fi Spaceman

In intervening years, this Marine had served the state of Ohio as an able Senator (1974-1999), considered running for President (1980, 1984; his slogan was "Soar to New Heights"), been punched in the face by a lunatic (1989), and returned to orbit (1998).

Now, in the summer of 2004, I was handling a music project for Discovery Channel in the new Silver Spring, MD Global HQ, and Senator Glenn made a VIP appearance for an after-hours event connected with a Discovery programming stunt on Astronomy ("Quark Week"?).  From 5:30 to 7:00 one weekday evening, we milled around the ground floor lobby with drinks before filing into the auditorium to hear Founder and Chairman John Hendricks, son of a Huntsville, AL space program engineer himself, introduce John and promote the new extravaganza.

I'd met Buzz Aldrin (he narrated my "Beyond Planet Earth" CD-ROM project and did a number of other TV projects for Discovery), and found him to be a bit of a self-promoter; I always thought he'd carried a chip on his shoulder about letting Neil get his boot down first.  Since Glenn seemed to have more of the Right Stuff, I took the opportunity to shake his hand.  I mentioned my father's 1966 adventure and made an ersatz "orbital/rotational gesture" with my arm as I said something about "coming full circle," and added something about it being a "small world."  Glenn politely picked up on these (through gritted teeth, I suspect) - he  didn't recall the kindness at the Lord Jeff, but smiled genuinely and said "I'm sure I appreciated that!" and he laughed when I told him that my mother had always admonished my brothers and me when bathing, to "Be careful - you know John Glenn slipped and hurt his head in the bathtub!"

Two mornings later before dawn - less than 48 hours after the soiree - with nobody present - a large pane of window glass fell ten stories down through the atrium into the Discovery Channel lobby, exploding like a galaxy of stars as it shattered in a zillion pieces.  Had this happened two evenings before, it could have been a disaster.

Living dangerously in orbit, in the bathtub, in Discovery Channel HQ:
God Speed, John Glenn!

Glenn/Porter '84

"Good Luck, Mr. Aldrin"

Neil Armstrong

My Impertinent Connection with James Burke

A great IDEA, like a great song, has persistence and will come back around, will live, and evolve in new applications and accoutrements.

Such is the "Human Business" of Innovation...

After Discovery Channel acquired TLC and began to invest in first-run programming, we knew that Connections, with James Burke was a knockout concept, had been a winner in the PBS system in the late 70's, and still had a core of devoted fans.  We resurrected it, made a hit of it on cable and in home video.  Then we set out to do it justice as a Discovery Multimedia interactive "real world game."

JB: The Encyclopaedia Wore a Leisure Suit

The CD-ROM game would follow the promise of the series: James would dive in and hop-scotch through time across scientific-historical steppingstones from one madcap innovation to another, weaving a verbal string of ingeniously-related anecdotes based on relations - some solid, others coincidental, a priori, or downright tenuous.  One or two of the most entertaining examples were quite rococo, yet so glib and charming was James that he could pull it off.

I recall thinking, of some examples, that perhaps it was all a bit of a parlo(u)r trick, and I said as much in our very first meeting. Mistake - the audacity!  He could - and should - have cut me to the quick, but...

All that was missing was the yad

Instead, high-brow James unfurled a huge scroll of parchment - 15 feet long by 30 inches wide - across the 20-foot executive conference room table.  On it were hundreds of constellations, each with 5 or 6 to 20+ pencil-written "nodes," each node a pivotal event that capitalized on applied learning to introduce a solution that not only solved a problem but also led to successive innovation.

The ersatz map of the night sky depicted what Burke called the "web of knowledge," and even included extra leaves that he would fold under to link across levels and conjoin multiple constellations with one or more shared nodes.  James had painstakingly hand-made this work of cartography, and he'd clutched and carried it like a precious Torah scroll during the pitch meetings at the network. Its existence was legendary; to have him unfurl it for our team was a huge honor.

Understand that we were seeing this in 1993 and early 1994, only months before getting a first peek at Hypertext Markup Language and the eventual/true wwweb.  Lo and behold, that Burkeian "web of knowledge" now has new life as an interactive application for personal exploration, creativity and corporate development from the James Burke Institute.

See knowledge web 'Mystery Tour' examples such as "King Frederick to the Bottle Cap (via Voltaire)," or "Cornflakes to Communism."


James was game for making Connections interactive, and very involved in the concept and development.  He joined the team for several planning meetings, and we reviewed the software shoulder to shoulder as the project came together (we commissioned SF-based developer Luminaria who'd produced the most excellent mythology title Wrath of the Gods).

At our direction, Luminaria shamelessly patterned Connections on Myst, which my QA team were playing when they weren't playing networked DOOM.  James was genuinely pleased with the way that Connections came out, and promoted it with vigor.  The title became Discovery's first seven-figure seller.

Without modesty I'll assert that our little "It's A Mind Game" effort, in more ways than one, was a CD-ROM approximation - a tiny bi-sect - of what would emerge shortly as the consumer-oriented and media-rich Internet.  It used the medium to go well beyond what had been possible in the linear television format.

Rob Bole: "The show was smart, interesting and really underscored how all ideas and objects are built upon the accretion of human knowledge, insight and innovation.

"You fool, you!"

When I first understood what a URL was - meaning when I first experienced linking I immediately thought that promise of James Burke's Connections was finally at my fingertips. Through the magic of linking I could wander off through the vast store of human knowledge; sometimes following determined paths, but others through luck or fancy that would lead to new insights and appreciation for our world.

Amazing! The World Wide Web was going to be my encyclopedia, teacher and exploration portal all in one. While I did not appreciate or understand it then this was the potential to index the knowledge of the world through a commonly-understood metadata; the accretion of thousands of individual decisions about context that would help build a vast human store of experience.

However, the web has never really lived up to this promise." (read more at PublicPurposeMedia)

We Drank Deeply, & with Satisfaction

James really took care as we built the title together, and afterward.  An old hand at the book tour game, and a veteran huckster from his days as on-air talent for BBC covering the Apollo lunar excursions and other science topics, he gamely went on the road with us and nailed the endless interviews, demonstrations, and promotions with style, wit and class.

In this mad rush, to share a pint with Sir James on La Croisette in Cannes, captivated by his knowledge and drawn in warmly by his passionate love for people and their ideas, was my unique and lasting joy.

Thankfully, but not surprisingly, he was way too well-bred to be-head me over the parlo(u)r-trick jibe....

My Night in Sri Lanka with Arthur C. Clarke

"Would you believe in something beyond your understanding?"

- Russ Meyer, 1967

During the early 1990's we had a good run on Discovery Channel with supernatural, or "paranormal" themes, eventually building a regular program block and airing occasional Sunday night showcase Specials.  The success of Shark Week (all hail the maestro, Steve Cheskin) begat Aliens Invasion Week.  Paranormal show ratings were abnormally solid, and the advertisers loved the block.  A big reason for this was the audience that "spontaneously generated" upon the premiere of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World in 1990.

As I was then directing the production management department and would also oversee selling the videotapes to viewers, I participated in the meet&greet telephone call to convince Sir Arthur to dust off his 1980 British (Yorkshire/ITV) series and allow Discovery to re-cut it for cable TV.  Arthur had ex-patriated to Sri Lanka, so that's where we tracked him down.

It was a weird call: at ACC's request we scheduled the call at 6:30am his time - 9:00pm ours (yes, he was nine and-a-half hours ahead).  My hilarious boss (Clark, no "e") gathered us in a dreary interior Landover, MD conference room, turned on the Polycom, and turned out the lights.  He produced a spooky flashlight and we clowned around with it during the call, like runny-nosed kids around a campfire - Clarke's dis-embodied voice floating in from Sri Lanka, his pronouncements all pretty ... inscrutable.  We made the deal though.  It was my only contact with the spirit world.

A.C. Clarke's brilliant science fiction stories opened minds to possibilities beyond reality, beyond imagination.  They are still changing perception today.  Mysterious World was one of the Discovery Channel shows that I actually watched, and loved!

Scientist/futurist before becoming a fiction writer, Clarke envisioned for the first time ever a system of orbiting, geostationary communications satellites.  The vision was realized decades later and is the basis for Discovery Channel's (and HBO's, and Fox News', and everyone else's respective) multi-billion-$$ businesses. Clarke himself never made a ha'penny on the idea - but he published it first here in 1945, in Wireless World.

"It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them."

- Arthur C. Clarke, 1963