Max's Brushes with Greatness

• I bumped into Joe Montana at the Palo Alto airport; we were both pre-flighting our planes. His was blocking mine.
• I gave a videoconferencing demonstration to Seal when he was visiting Apple. He was unimpressed.
• My stepdad was in the same West Point class with "Stormin'" Norman Schwarzkopf. Everyone made a big deal about how smart Norm was supposed to be, but my stepdad graduated thirteen places above him. Of course, Norm has been on TV a lot more ...
• I saw Danny Glover scurrying through the Denver airport.
• While working at a computer store in a mall, I tried to sell a TI 99/4a computer to the then-president of Texas Instruments, J. Fred Busey, without knowing who he was.
• I shook hands with Lorne Greene at an awards ceremony in high school.
• At another awards ceremony I shook hands with the then-governor of Texas, Mark White.
• Malcolm Gillis, president of Rice University, personally wanted me thrown in jail, for reasons I am not at liberty to discuss.
• I went to college with Allen Fiuzat, the guy who played the boy in the Benji movies.
• Richard Feynman guest-lectured to my summer school physics class that I took at Caltech. He recalled the story of his oral Ph.D. exams, in which he was asked whether red was on the outside or inside of a rainbow, and got it wrong. He then said he'd forgotten the right answer. He tried to re-derive it on the blackboard and got it wrong again.
• I went to elementary school with Dallas Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach's daughters. Some other old Dallas Cowboy players lived in our neighborhood; I had a crush on the daughter of linebacker D.D. Lewis, and delivered the newspaper to center John Fitzgerald (who always tipped big).
• One of my old roommates, Jeff Hagen, designed the seats on the space shuttle. (Links to pictures forthcoming.)
• My friend Giselle's sister-in-law is Tanya Donelly, pop star formerly of Throwing Muses and Belly. I had the privledge of being in the wedding party with her.
• I met the woman who, as a little girl, was the girl who yelled "Doodie! Doodie!" in the pool scene in Caddyshack.
• I had a brief conversation with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison when he was practicing take-offs and landings at the Half Moon Bay airport. I asked him a couple of questions about his French fighter jet (I had thought it was a MiG). The last thing I said was, "I would sell my soul for a ride in that thing." After that he ignored me.