Twenty Years
Ago
How to best collect email depends on how much you’re away. If you do a lot of traveling, the most common solution is to carry a notebook or hand-held computer equipped with a modem, which allows you to connect from most telephones. Using a national or regional Internet service provider with connection points local to your destinations will eliminate long-distance charges.
Some intrepid road warriors use wireless modems with services such as ARDIS… But access can be slow and coverage spotty, and unless you really need to, who wants to be connected all the time? —Reid Goldsborough, May 26 – June 1, 1999
Thirty Years
Ago
For two years I have watched the faces of the homeless who frequent my neighborhood. I only take notice of those individuals who stand out: the ones who congregate during the day at the civic center post office, panhandle at the Santa Venetia Market, and fall asleep on picnic benches in various locations. At night these same individuals often sleep in sleeping bags and tents in the green areas surrounding the lagoon. During the bitter weather, as many as possible move inside the armory at night, but those who are turned away because of drunkenness, aberrant behavior or lack of space stay in the neighborhood, pitching tents or sleeping in their cars. —Kate Fitzsimmons, May 26, 1989
Forty Years
Ago
Alien is a lean, dead-ahead story—simple, with all extra embellishments stripped away and all its richness concentrated in its high visual style. All this Alien has in common with director Ridley Scott’s first film, The Duelists. But inside that spare superstructure (and there were only hints in his first work that Scott could command this power) lies the most exhausting exercise in pure terror ever to leap from a screen. . . . Most space-film women are so clench-toothed about being e-f-f-i-c-i-e-n-t that they lose all the fun: in this category newcomer Sigourney Weaver deserves a page all her own. She may be the actress to inherit the Jane Fonda roles, should the mantle of Wonder Woman ever drop from Fonda’s shoulders. Weaver is intelligent, classy, tough and warm, the perfect contemporary heroine. —Shelia Benson, May 25, 1979
Compiled by Alex Randolph
