Dreams, Moments, Travels
Family from left to right: Mike and Penny Knezetic, me, Ann, and Woody Burns. And in the front row, Sarge’s butt (Woody’s dog), John Wise (my father), and his wife Diana. We were meeting at Ihop in Calabasas, California. This was the last time I saw my Aunt Penny, as by the time Caroline and I visited Buffalo, New York, later this year, she was in a nursing home.
This view is on the drive from Phoenix, Arizona, to Los Angeles, California. We are heading out for a long weekend and traveling with our new 3MP camera that promises to greatly improve the image quality of the stuff I shoot.
Yesterday, I posted a short post about Alienzoo; I forgot to include this shot that was modified in Photoshop by Mike, the two-faced guy to the right of the priest.
Back in the summer of 1999, I kicked off a new company called Alienzoo with the help of Rick Buonincontri as co-founder. Rick is in the back row on the right. In the heady days of internet mayhem where everyone was on their way to being millionaires, we jumped on the hot topic of aliens intending to be a portal to all other-worldly phenomena.
This is Jim Dilettose, who was our resident UFO expert. At this time, Jim was featured in all media, from Art Bell to the Discovery Channel, who were all tapping him for his knowledge and connections in the world of the aliens.
Late nights and heavy partying created not only a dynamic, creative culture but also a highly volatile one. We were supposed to make money and make it fast, but our portal to outer space needed to be fleshed out and then built out; only time wasn’t allowing that as we needed cash flow NOW.
Grant Wiggins, on the left, was our primary creative writer and reporter at large. Caroline Wise in the middle was our chief programmer and Mike Devarennes was our artist responsible for the look and feel of the company.
It was Mike D. who created this incredible poster that 21 years later would still be hanging framed on my wall.
I was the first to leave the company, as the fact of the matter was that Rick raised the capital from friends and family and he needed to protect their investment. It was around this time in mid-August that I think I left while Caroline stuck around a few more months trying to help them smooth out some rough edges while they continued their best to monetize the company. The friction Rick and I encountered would estrange us for more than 15 years before we were able to once again say hello and sympathize with one another about the tumultuous time.
This is Kevin “Cabin Boy” Lehr, who was working for me at Alienzoo at the time this photo was taken. What’s significant about this image is that I had just bought a Sony DCS-S75 Cyber-shot 3MP digital camera with 3x optical zoom, and this is the very first photo I ever took with that camera. Not only were we adding more than a full mega-pixel of image quality, but we were also moving away from floppy disks and were now able to save on 64MB memory sticks. This was significant for the quality improvements and seriously cheaper by $200 than our previous camera, with this one costing only $599. WOW!
Happy 4th of July from Catalina Island in sunny Southern California.
About to head back to the mainland and our drive to Phoenix, Arizona.
And off we go.