Marshall McLuhan

I guess I should explain that comment below about Marshal McLuhan's daughter. My father, Gerald Emanuel Stearn, edited a book called McLuhan: hot & cool, which is a collection of essays about McLuhan, ending with an interview between my Dad and McLuhan. As I remember it, they sat in our living room of our first house in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. It was an odd house. A stream once ran through the dinning room and would return from time to time. There was also what had been an indoor-outdoor fish tank in the floor, which had been filled up with sand. We had an indoor-outdoor sand box. A tree grew through the garage and squirrels ran around my summer bedroom. It was in the woods, which were very green and smothering. The living room was up on the second floor and had stone floor with a lamb-skin rug over it. My father was very proud of the quality of his stereo on the stone floor. There was a fire in fireplace and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. There were two interviews and 20 hours of tape, my father says in the book. But maybe the interviews took place somewhere else; in Toronto which was ugly and grey then. The conversation would have been nice in that living room. Anyhow, it's those 20 hours of tape my mother gave to McLuhan's daughter, Teri. I have to see about getting them back.

Don't Put Down Iowa Hog Farmers

Rant on behalf of my husband -- In his Washington Sketch today, Dana Milbank can't imagine an Iowa hog farmer understanding legends from Abraham Lincoln to Marshal McLuhan. What an insult to Iowa farmers. Talk about inside the beltway snobs.

Speaking of Marshal McLuhan, his daughter owes me an audio tape of our fathers talking together 40 years ago. I keep forgetting to write to her and demand that damn tape back that my mother ill-advisedly gave her, like, 10 years ago. I'm sure she has way more tapes of her father than I do of mine. None, in my case.