Dan Downing

Gets his nom-de-blog smiling Dan from his late Mom’s ubiquitous broad smile, bequeathed to him long since. It helps him not only deliver the best rendition of the Wide Mouth Frog joke, but also fends off getting blasted by other readers for the occasional unvarnished comment.  A runner-up name might have been Danny-come-lately, as he is often days behind reading the week’s entries.

Maincourse readers know him as a stickler for paragraphs, punctuation, and pithiness, sure to point out other contributor’s transgressions – all in the spirit of user-friendly readability, of course!

Adam

He of the ubiquitous ellipsis, also sometimes known as el Kib (but one of his many pseudonyms), Adam believes himself to have instigated the practice of entering creative “names” and “email addresses” — and he’s still the biggest stickler for the correctly-“pronounced” use of “@” in that game. Without which we would not worship the death-defying games of rakkity, smile at the passions of laRad, or marvel at the insights of he-who-once-called-himself-pohaku. That this name-game defies Web-bots trolling for the spammable is but an after-the-fact-realization perk — it simply presents a whimsical, mini-comment opportunity (but that the blogmeister himself mostly eschews this game does, however, give Adam some pause … ).

Called by some the blog’s “junkyard dog”, he was there at its inception and still daily checks for comments approximately every seven seconds — about as often as he once thought about sex (according to some aging statistics on men). In between, he devotes 4 of the other six seconds to lighting design (link to Lukas&Adam generously provided by this site), and 2 (sorry, just being honest here) to the love of his life – his wife Tricia (and their family).

Michael

I grew up in Ohio and I have Norman Rockwell paintings etched in my mind: cowlicked cohorts calling “Oh Mike” outside my door, low-limbed oak trees whispering “Climb me,” piles of sweet smelling burning leaves, and yards without fences. You ran to a friend’s house using the street, the side walk or adjoining yards. It mattered not.

I like to think of the blog as my old neighborhood.

Travis (by Michael)

There are those on the blog who like context, as in, who ‘dat? From my point of view, since I didn’t ask for a bio from Travis, and I’m not sure he’d a written one anyway, I’m going to add a few lines about who he is to me. And that may have to suffice.

I’ve known Travis, second son of Jeffro, since birth, though not really well until he turned fifteen and traveled from his home in Indiana to work for my brother’s company – Channel 1. Travis’s first job involved typing for a skilled coder who suffered from RSI. The summers after his first, he worked with me on chathouse.com related stuff as the resident PHP expert.

The most remarkable thing about Travis in those days, beyond his ability to make my arduous repetitive tasks one-click-easy, and his penchant for buying me lunch, was his ability to wake-up every morning at 5:15 so we could arrive in Cambridge by 6. That put us back on the road at 2:30 PM, effectively cutting out traffic on both ends of our commute. He’d sleep on the way in and I’d conk out on the way home, except when we stopped for blind Benny thumbing home to Townsend.

I have two other fond memories of Travis. The first, from long ago, is sitting in his living room and listening to the giggles and booms and bangs as he and his brother beat-up dear old dad in an upstairs bedroom. I had the feeling those were frequent wrestling matches. The second is from the day I paid for Travis and Damone (my wayward godson) to circle above our house in a three seater Cessna. It might of had four seats, but it was so windy that day the pilot thought it safe to only take the two boys. Somewhere I have a photo of both Travis and Damone trying to “escape” over a chain link fence as the pilot readies the plane for take off.

Travis graduated (both from high school and Channel 1) and went off to Carleton then to graduate school in California. His last summer living at our house was 2000.

La Madre

I know of MaineCourse because one of my daughters (La Chica) traveled to Nicaragua with Matt 2 years ago, and communicated less with her parents than with Michael (who put it on the blog). I have an older daughter whose experiences in Washington DC surrounding her arrest between anti-war demonstrations enabled her to write the kick-ass college application essay that may have got her into Smith, where she is very happy. I teach science at the public school in a nearby town.

My father was born a Jew in Germany. He and his mother came to the US in 1941 when he was 11. His grandmother joined them later. My mother’s people were New Englanders before the American Revolution. My parents first met at a Quaker work camp when they were both 15.

We have 2 birds, not very many fish any more spread between two large tanks, 3 cats and 1 dog. Most of these were at the instigation of La Chica, who is leaving home at the end of the summer to go to Oberlin, which she got into perhaps due to the kick-ass college application essay she wrote about her third trip to Nicaragua.