Time flies when it is always winter. In upper New York State the snows came early in the autumn of last year and have stayed ever so late. It's March and at dawn today the temperature was still well below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. In the Valley, in Texas circus tents are rising in empty lots but here, far away even the crocus dare not pop from the frosty ground with its thin veneer of mud when the sun reaches its afternoon apex.
Where have I been?
Around.
Why so quiet?
That would make for a very long story.
It's enough to say that on a hot summer lot several years ago I decided that blogs, or pictures, long-winded prose wasn't always the best way to tell a circus story. And not every circus story needed to be told. It was time to wait for some new tools. Some might argue the tool of the moment, the ubiquitous Go-Pro cameras are just such a tool. Go-Pros are great inside a shark tank or tied to a weather balloon at the edge of space, but they remain an impersonal device -- God's unblinking eye -- just another box filled with images.
Enter Glass.
Two years ago Google -- either humanity's greatest champion, or worse enemy -- announce a product called glass. A bit of Star Trek technology beaming information directly into the user's eye and more importantly capturing stories exactly as the user sees them. No buttons, no tripods, no cumbersome helmets or headgear. For a year glass has been in beta testing, several thousand "explorers" playing with the technology to see what stories they can tell. Google doesn't make glass easy to come by. The price tag alone deselects casual experiments and the pickup spots in NY, LA and San Francisco -- where Base Camp training takes place -- adds another layer of complexity. Moreover glass can only be had by residents of a few countries.
All right, I'm being longwinded again.
The point is, next week I get my glass. And I'll look for a circus and stories to tell.
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