Agent Palmer

I can’t help but be in awe of some of the authors I have read in my lifetime. Many of those authors came from a different time, and there are two specifically that I haven’t read as much of as I want. One is Hunter S. Thompson, and the other is Tom Wolfe, who is the subject of a new documentary released at the tail end of last year.

Both authors are similar in my view as I’ve read only one of each of their books. For Hunter, it was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas some decades ago, and for Wolfe, it was The Right Stuff just a few years ago.

Fumbling the Future, is a book published in 1988 about “How Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer.” It all starts with three questions: Name the companies responsible for the longest playing series of personal computer commercials? The most creative single commercial? The first personal computer commercial?

The answers, as you find out through the first page and the subtitle, are IBM’s Charlie Chaplin ads, Apple Computers’ 1984 Super Bowl commercial, and Xerox.

I spent a lot of the last two months of this year listening to an album from 2020 by Tim Minchin, whose art I not only appreciate but am inspired by. Here’s the catch… I didn’t even know about the album until late October. In fact, I first listened to it the same day I finally listened to The Rolling Stones 2023 studio album Hackney Diamonds.

How did it come to this?

So, as you may or may not be aware, I created a “Promise” playlist back in November. In my research to create that playlist and the affiliated post, I encountered enough “Promises” songs to do a follow up.

The songs below are selected from the playlist, but they are not the entire playlist. The same rules apply to the Promises playlist that applied to Promise, only I’m throwing out the singular. This is only songs titled “Promises.” No “My Promises” or “Our Promises.”