Category: Essays

Racing in the Dark

/ John Biggs

South Brooklyn is quiet. Where there was once an endless chaos of cars and trucks rolling up Sixth Avenue onto the highway, now there is only the expected. The morning begins with a lost Leviathan calling in the fog, a ship coming up an empty river under a silent bridge. Birds come next, in this city of perches, chirping and skittering in the ivy outside our home. The next few hours are tedious with the sound of truck tires hitting a single metal plate in the street outside.

And then we hear the distant sirens, high and lonesome in the empty streets.

How I fight back against IRS?scammers

/ John Biggs

Every call I get on my phone is a scam. I haven?t gotten a real call in what seems like years. My mom Facetimes us and my kids text so I know that when a Brooklyn 646 number pops up its someone trying to give me Medicare funded braces or a great line of credit for my fish pornography business, FishPix, which, apparently, their systems now think I run.

In Memoriam: Robert Lee Biggs, Age 79

/ John Biggs

My dad, Robert Lee Biggs, died on January 2 after a year-long battle with lung cancer. He was 79.?I spent his last hours with him reading to him from his favorite books. He had a Master’s Degree in English from OSU and he was a life-long reader. I’ve often written about how he bought us boxes and boxes of discarded library?books of all types and simply put them on our playroom shelves. Over the years, from my early reader days until today, I was able to drink from that deep well and still hope I will be able to?put it to good use. This is us on the front page of a section of the Columbus Dispatch in about 1979 when they profiled my mother’s Polish rooots and all the good things she made for us to eat. That’s me at the bottom.

Unleash technology, get freedom

/ John Biggs

I?ve spent the last few years trying to help people communicate. I?ve learned that communication, especially intelligent communication about complex topics, is the key to nearly every human advancement. And I?ve learned that modern innovators are quickly leaving the rest of us behind because they can?t communicate their ideas succinctly and interestingly. Great ideas die because they cannot be explained.

Internet Stone Soup

/ John Biggs

Almost fifteen years ago I’d wake in a cold sweat almost every day. In the early-morning murk I’d stumble down to my basement office, still in my pajamas. Proper ablutions – a shower, a shave, clothes – would come later, after I confirmed the world had not disappeared overnight.?

I’d wake up my computer and discover, to my dismay, that it had not.

I was full-time blogger, the little brother to the journalist, the digital-ink-stained wretch that pounded out content for millions of readers with speed and attempted accuracy. I don’t consider myself that now – I needed a bit of a break from chasing news – but I still write too much and sit around too long. But back then, when blogging was new, I would click a button on my computer to bring up a list of exciting and interesting pieces of information – Sony was releasing a new computer, someone had hacked Target, someone had shown a cat how to use an iPad. I would select sixteen to twenty stories, opening them one by one and placing them, like cans to be plinked on a rail, on my tabs bar.
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Switch to?manual

/ John Biggs

Before John Glenn died of old age at 95 he almost died more than 9,000 times. That?s how many hours he spent in experimental aircraft. Add in his normal sorties and the hours he spent in orbit and re-entry and it would seem that he took unnecessary and unacceptable risks for the sake of his pride, his country, and science.