I was born in Boston and kept moving west as I got educated: western Mass (the University of Mass at Amherst), Iowa (the University of Iowa in Iowa City), Minnesota (The Univ. of Minnesota) in Minneapolis). I landed a job teaching at San Francisco State and have been in the Bay Area since 1965. I've been married for 51 years, but it only seems like 47 or 48 years, to a former philosophy professor. I've kept a journal since 1956 and all my books have come out of the journals. I'm an artist and illustrate my books and books by other writers from time to time. I have two children and four grandchildren. Now, in 2012, I've got a number of books in various stages of recent or future publication:1. Bali Tourism. Routledge. Published in September, 2012 (I hope).2. Japan Tourism: An Ethno-Semiotic Analysis. Published in 2010.3. The Cultural Theorist's Book of Quotations. Published in 2010.4. The Objects of Affection: Semiotics and Consumer Culture. 2012. 5. Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication. 4th edition. Published in 2012.6. Media, Myth and Culture. Published in 2012.7. Theorizing Tourism: Analyzing Tourist Destinations. Published in 2012.From August 23 to September 22 of 2012 I was a Fulbright Senior Specialist and spent a month in Argentina attending a conference and giving a lecture at it on visual semiotics and then lecturing to various groups of people (professors, students, the general public) in Buenos Aires and La Plata and Rosario.