Welcome!
FAQ •
Activities
Speaking
Blog
Shugendō

Everything You Never Wanted to Know About “Lefty”
すべての「レフティ」について!」

Why “Lefty”?

Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named “David”. Plus I am actually left-handed, which seems the least I could do, under the circumstances.

Why “Stone Mirrror”?

It’s a literal translation of the “dharma name” I received when I began studying Zen at around the age of 20, 石鏡, “Ijika”. It’s derived from an old Zen story, and demonstrates three things: my roshi knew me too well; he had an evil sense of humor; and there's no simple way to say, “Runs with scissors” in Japanese.

You studied Zen?

For quite a while, Sōtō-shū, which you may begin to find fairly frightening if you think about it too long—I'd gently suggest that this may have to do with your preconceptions about Buddhism in general and Zen in particular. I held, for a while, the post of jikidō, which involves stalking around the meditation hall and whacking people (at their request) with a sort of lightweight cudgel called a “keisaku”, or “educational stick”. I've also studied Tibetan Vajrayana and am currently engaged in Japanese esoteric Buddhism, specifically Shingon-shū, as well as Shintō and the syncretic spiritual practice known as shugendō.

How long have you been involved with technology?

Almost as long as there’s been any, it seems. I first programmed a computer in 1969 while in junior high school, wrote code for Internet Message Processors on the ARPAnet at NYU in the mid-70s, did database and “office automation” for a number of commecial banks in New York through the 80s, worked for Apple through the 90s, and have been involved in mobile devices and software “beyond the desktop” since then.

You worked at Apple?

For two weeks shy of ten years, which was a miscalculation: I have a 5-year plaque signed by Michael Spindler somewhere. Another two weeks, and I'd have had a 10-year plaque signed by Steve, which would have been worth a lot more on eBay. I am on a very short list of people who have a) argued with Steve Jobs; b) not lost, precisely; and c) kept their badges in spite of a) and b).

What is “shugendō”?

Shugendō (修験道) is a syncretic system of Japanese spiritual practice which combines elements of esoteric Buddhism, Shintō, as well as Japanese shamanism, mountain worship and sorcery. Its practitioners are called yamabushi, or "mountain warriors". For more information, see the overview page.

What is your favorite system of government?

Me, as "Benevolent Despot for Life". Failing that, oligarchy, as long as I'm one of the few.

Are you the guy that…?

Yeah. That was me.

What do you do when you're bored?

I honestly haven't had the chance to find out yet. If I ever get bored, I'll let you know.

101 True Facts About Lefty

I Swear I Am Not Making Any Of This Up.

  1. I've been called “Lefty” since 3rd grade, when I was in a class with 3 other children whose first names were also “David” and whose last names also began with the letter “S”, thus defeating the usual name-space collision measures.
  2. I worked summers in my grandfather's law firm through high school, and might have effectively been one of the first bicycle messengers in Manhattan. People thought I was out of my mind at the time: nobody rode a bike in Manhattan traffic.
  3. I've been a Firesign Theater fan since high school, and can quote long stretches of their comedy albums from the 70s.
  4. I get compliments on my ability with chopsticks from Japanese people: I've used chopsticks so long I can't remember not knowing how.
  5. I have seen more horror movies than you have.
  6. I know Kibo.
  7. I can write over 2,000 kanji.
  8. I free-climbed the Kensico Dam in Valhalla, NY once.
  9. I make a mean omelet.
  10. I know exactly where the Japanese reggae section is at the Shibuya Tower Records, and I have a "Points Card" from there.
  11. I own a small trebuchet of my own construction.
  12. I'm a fair "shade tree carpenter": I've made a dresser, a four-poster bed and some other things.
  13. I attended Dan Fagin's "old school" for a year.
  14. I received a very polite letter from the Dean of Students of said school at one point, asking that I refrain from scaling, the fronts of the dormitories on Main Campus in order to get to my friends' rooms. She cited liability insurance and setting a bad example for others as concerns.
  15. I achieved the rank of “Sharpshooter, 3rd Bar” at the age of 17.
  16. I own copies of every "Zatoichi" movie ever made.
  17. I hate to be called "Dave". Don't do it, please. I’ll answer to “David”, but so will three other guys, typically.
  18. I own six pairs of yellow sneakers, all different.
  19. I travel an average of 120,000 miles or so a year.
  20. I did a Buddhist pilgrimage in Tokushima-ken, Shikoku, Japan last year, (mostly) walking a total of 140 km. from temple to temple, staying in old-style Japanese inns and temple housing along the way; I climbed two 500 m. mountains in one day, climbing down the first one in order to climb up the second. Surprisingly, down is worse.
  21. I am not related to anyone famous named "Schlesinger", including (but not limited to) John Schlesinger (the film director), James Schlesinger (former head of the CIA and Secretary of Defense), Arthur Schlesinger (the historian), or Leon Schlesinger (producer of the "Loony Tunes" cartoons).
  22. I know the location of "the pump" that "don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle", which Bob Dylan refers to in "Subterranean Homesick Blues". No idea about the handle.
  23. If you used Open Transport or AppleTalk Remote Access on a Mac between Mac OS 8.1 and Mac OS 9.x, you used code written by the team I managed.
  24. I have a collection of over 2,000 DVDs, most of them either horror movies or samurai movies.
  25. My favorite cities are Tōkyō and Amsterdam.
  26. My least favorite city is Las Vegas, possibly because I've never been able to find my way out of whatever hotel I've been staying at whenever I've visited there.
  27. Before I started traveling so much, I did theatrical lighting for community theater groups as a hobby.
  28. I wrote code for Internet Message Processors (IMPs) to connect sites to the ARPAnet (which grew up to be the Internet) on PDP-8s back in the 70s, and have had one sort of email or another continuously since around 1975.
  29. I can recite the Lewis Carroll poem "Jabberwocky" from memory, in both Engish and French.
  30. I have had two cups of kopi luwak, mostly to be able to say I had.
  31. I am a big fan of Bill Hicks, Robin Williams and Steven Wright.
  32. I studied taiji for a long time; my last teacher was a Czech from Prague, who taught me the trick of going through the entire form at high speed while holding a lit cigarette in my hand: when I finish, the cigarette is one, long, unbroken ash.
  33. The first book I ever read was The House at Pooh Corner, at the age of 4. I still have that copy.
  34. If you used a Macintosh II with a NuBus token ring or Ethernet card, you ran code I wrote.
  35. I ran sound board for Talking Heads at New York's C.B.G.B. once; they were playing warm-up for a band called The Shirts.
  36. I have determined, to my own satisfaction, that I know my way around Amsterdam better than I do San Jose, California.
  37. I have always worn my hair very short; when a new barber asked me how I combed it, I answered, "When I need to comb it, I get it cut."
  38. I have seen Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention play live at New York's Felt Forum on Hallowe’en.
  39. I managed to bully my management chain at Apple into supporting the work of the IETF ZEROCONF group, by allowing a PhD engineer reporting to me to do as little for work Apple itself as we could get away with for two years or so; this eventually led to Rendezvous (now Bonjour), as well as to Apple’s eventually releasing it under an open source license.
  40. I once spent a week during which every one of the hundred or so comments I made on Livejournal was a relevant movie quote.
  41. I can cook steak au poivre without a recipe.
  42. I have established, to my own satisfaction, that the second use to which any new technology is put inevitably has something to do with pornography.
  43. After having gotten so lost in Tōkyō that it took me 90 minutes to make the 10-minute walk back to my hotel, I now carry a compass with me at all times.
  44. Every compass I carry, inexplicably, ends up somehow pointing South rather than North; I wish someone could explain this to me.
  45. I met Billy Joel at 3 am in the Astor Place subway station while he was shooting the cover of the album, "Turnstiles". I got an autograph from him, with the comment, "Weird, huh?"
  46. I am apparently one of perhaps two or three experts in the United States on bonji, or siddham, an even more obsolete form of written Sanskrit than most forms of written Sanskrit, and one which now exists only in Japan and, to a lesser degree, in Korea and China. I've had an American Tendai-shū priest—who should probably know better—ask me for advice on mantras and lettering.
  47. I know the best place to go to buy a samurai sword in Tōkyō.
  48. I am not the same David Schlesinger who is editor-in-chief of Reuters. He makes me a lot harder to find on Google, which I appreciate.
  49. When I go back and read postings I made on USENET in the 80s, I'm surprised at how witty they are.
  50. I bowl left-handed; I play baseball right-handed; I play ping-pong ambidextrously.
  51. I used to ride a motorcycle, up until the point that some 83-year-old guy decided to make a left turn 15 feet in front of me.
  52. I spent six months on crutches as a result, and determined that they aren't nearly as much fun as they look.
  53. I have decided that people who would otherwise become professional dominatrices, but who don't like to wear leather, become physical therapists instead.
  54. I am reasonably familiar with the terms of the Code Duello.
  55. I have absolutely no sense of what goes with what in terms of clothing. Back in the days when I wore suits, a salesperson asked me if I wanted the things I'd bought (picked out with her help) labeled, so I'd “be able to tell what color they were.” When I asked her what on earth she was talking about, it turned out that she’d assumed that I was color-blind.
  56. I do not believe in asking questions to which I don't want the answers.
  57. As a corollary, I do not believe in asking what's in anything that I'm eating, since knowing cannot possibly make me any happier.
  58. I know how many different kinds of Kryptonite there are, and what they do.
  59. If you used AppleTalk or MacTCP between 1993 and 1995, you used code which was maintained by me and my team at Apple.
  60. When I was two, I got my arm stuck in an elevator door while it went up a few floors; by the time someone had the presence of mind to stop the elevator and pry the door open, it was discovered that my wrist was half an inch away from a pair of electrical contacts, so I've been living on “borrowed time” ever since.
  61. I aspired for a long time to drinking 50 cups of coffee a day, after hearing that Voltaire had done that; I despaired of ever making it, until I realized one day (while drinking coffee in Amsterdam) that Voltaire had been drinking those tiny thimble-sized cups! I may already be there.
  62. I have a theory that all subway systems are actually connected to one another, and that it should be possible to get from Times Square to Shibuya, if I can only figure out the right connections.
  63. My favorite Chinese restaurant in Santa Cruz is Little Shanghai; I found it back in 1990, when everything was still in tents following the Loma Prieta quake. I ordered the fu-guay noodles, and liked them so much that in the 20 years I've been going there, I've never tried anything else on the menu.
  64. I have read all the original Sherlock Holmes stories and most of the hommages.
  65. I maintain a list of things I will do when I become a billionaire, including never wearing a pair of socks more than once, and hiring skywriters to write "Surrender Dorothy!" over major metrolitan areas at random intervals.
  66. I snuck in to see Clockwork Orange when it was first in the theaters, in spite of its having a "X" rating and my being only 15.
  67. I am not Keyser Soze, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
  68. Japanese noodles, ramen and soba in particular, are one of my biggest "comfort foods".
  69. I got the Brooklyn knocked out of my accent while I was a drama student; I can still do it for the entertainment of my friends.
  70. I used to be a soloist for a community choir in Santa Cruz.
  71. As a result, I own a single suit: a tuxedo.
  72. I know how to say, "I don't speak <<your language>>" in thirty or forty different languages.
  73. I have the largest hands of anyone I've ever met: my hands are the same size as the Bulgarian sūmō wrestler Kōtoōshū's, in spite of his having 8 inches and 80 pounds on me.
  74. Reading Robert Anton Wilson's and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy at the age of 19 was a life-changing experience for me.
  75. I have a copy of Talking Heads' More Songs About Building and Food, autographed by the band.
  76. By virtue of having a friend who worked backstage, I got to hang around and watch Saturday Night Live being filmed once, during its first season.
  77. At that time, I was asked at one point by John Belushi whether I thought I was "some kind of comedian".
  78. I made Ethernet cables by hand, back when an "Ethernet cable" looked like an orange garden hose, and you effectively connected a computer to the network by driving what amounted to a nail into the cable.
  79. I have a ridiculously large collection of t-shirts, many of them from Apple days.
  80. I own a custom t-shirt, drawn by Berke Breathed of Bloom County fame, which he produced for the "Common Hardware Reference Platform" team at Apple, and which features Opus the Penguin and the Banana Jr. 6000 computer.
  81. I used to own one of those absurd tools you needed to open the original Macintoshes, which looked like an 18" Torx screwdriver with a door-hinge where the handle should be.
  82. I have read all of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels. I hope to write a best-selling business management book called, What Would Fu Manchu Do? someday.
  83. I sing every summer with the Screaming Macaques, the world's only open source rock band. We did "Smoke on the Water" last summer, and I lost my voice for three days afterward.
  84. I saw the Rolling Stones perform, live, at the final perfornance of their "S.T.P. Tour" at Madison Square Garden in July, 1972.
  85. I'm attempting, on and off, to learn to read and write Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm still working on figuring out why, exactly.
  86. I had the chance to sign on as an able-bodied-seaman on a merchant ship bound to Yokohama after graduating from high school; letting my father browbeat me into going straight to college instead is my Big Regret.
  87. I used the CDC-6600 supercomputer at NYU's Courant Institute to calculate the probabilities of different I Ching hexagrams using the yarrow-stalk method and to work out the lengths of struts on geodesic domes; I used a PDP-16 that had a 16mm movie camera facing a CRT to make animations of tumbling Platonic solids, sort of primitive CGI.
  88. My favorite horror novel is T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies; it may be that I'm the only person who's ever read it.
  89. I have seen a sūmō tournament, live.
  90. I saw healthy-living advocate J.I. Rodale drop dead, live (so to speak), at a taping of the Dick Cavett Show.
  91. If anyone had asked me five years ago what I'd be doing now, there isn't a chance in a million that I would have guessed correctly.
  92. I am a co-founder (with Karl Lattimer, Rob Taylor and Dave Neary) of the Single Malt Appreciation Society for Hackers, Engineers and Developers (SMASHED), which holds a whisky-tasting at the GUADEC conference every summer. Our proudest accomplishment is that no one's gotten killed yet.
  93. I recently ran out of space in my passport for visa stamps, and had to send it off to the State Department for them to insert additional ones.
  94. I think takowasabi (octopus with Japanese horseradish) is the best thing to have with beer, ever.
  95. I can whistle the Blue Danube and Rossini's La Gazza Ladra with great accuracy.
  96. I am a polyphasic sleeper: I take short-ish naps, around the clock, much of the time. I can apparently do this indefinitely.
  97. Some of the odder things I've eaten include chicken feet, cod ovaries, basashi (horsemeat sashimi) and puréed raw quail.
  98. I was officially canonized as "St. Lefty" by the USENET group talk.bizarre for pointing out that baklava was the same as fish-paste, except that it contained honey, phyllo dough, walnuts and no fish.
  99. I am a believer in the "Nietzsche Diet": whatever doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.
  100. I have eaten yakitori at "Shomben Yokochō" ("Piss Alley") in Shinjuku.
  101. I can't play the piano, but I once worked out how to do the first six bars of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata"; I can still do this.


Return to the landing page...