Agent Palmer

Bye Bye Barry is a 2023 documentary that focuses on the circumstances and mystery surrounding Barry Sanders’ decision to retire at the height of his abilities. It’s told in a way that may actually satisfy some football fans’ sense of wonder regarding the decision.

But in order to understand the circumstances around his walking away, you have to tell the story of who Barry Sanders was and his career up until his retirement.

The Inhuman Condition is a collection of short stories by one of the modern masters of the macabre – Clive Barker. Published in 1986, these stories are some of the first published by Barker, and they set a tone of dark and delirious, sensuous and sentimental.

The five stories; The Inhuman Condition (of which the collection is also named after); The Body Politic; Revelations; Down, Satan!; and The Age of Desire, all focus on the nature of humanity.

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.

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.”