I miss them too—the revving monsters. The cars that shook coins in your pocket and made streetlights look like dripping mercury. Friday nights once smelled like hot rubber and possibility, and the throttle was a plot device. Need for Speed bleached our retinas; Fast & Furious taught engines to speak in subtitles; TAXI carved Paris into yellow lightning. Those films weren’t about transportation. They were about the physics of desire … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
The late Anita Roddick, famous female entrepreneur and founder of “Body Shop”, which became incredibly successful, once gave an interview to New English File – a book series used for teaching English as a Second Language. In it, she remarked that, “The world is no longer run by churches or politicians; it is run by corporations.” I hadn’t heard that one before, … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Basketball players call it ‘being in the zone’. Or ‘getting hot’. Athletes in other sports have the same encounters with this indefinable ‘magic’ when every fiber of coordination of the body and mind and vision seems to cooperate in such a way that, as soon as the ball leaves your hands, you know it’s going in; the basket is as big as an ocean; you … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
I did something last night that I guess only a person with my off-center mentality would do. Before I went to bed, I checked online to see if there were any old radio broadcasts of long-ago American baseball games available that I could listen to.
Why would I want to do that?
Well, maybe for the same reason people still go to Rolling … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Years ago, as I was ‘coming of age’, so to speak, in the 1960s, the place I most wanted to be was Greenwich Village in New York. This was where the folk scene (in the musical sense) evolved commercially, meaning that the general public started taking notice of it. Of course, the very idea of ‘commercialism’ (abhorrent then, as now, to many who … Read the rest
