LATEST ADDITIONS

Just relax and enjoy it—as Feynman said.

Mark Levinson has thick, black eyebrows and big, beautiful hands which flutter with energy and something more.

Turns out the theories about this have changed over time. This fascinating article reminds me of the great Simon Frith essay, "Why Do Songs Have Words?" Frith posited that pop song lyrics teach the young men of our decidedly unpoetic era the language of courtship.

A Nielsen/Netratings survey suggests they might. <I>Favorite alcoholic beveridge?</I> Hard cider. <I>Favorite car?</I> VW. <I>Favorite TV network?</I> Cartoon Network, followed by BBC America and HBO.

One of my favorites was left out. From Anthony Burgess' <I>Earthly Powers</I>: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

When Jim Wier told Wal-Mart he wanted them to stop selling his lawnmowers, was he being a good businessman or was he "the dumbest CEO ever to live"?

What song was top o' the charts when you were born? (Or, if you're older than the pop charts like me, on your 18th birthday?)

One of the best reads I've had in the last few years was Mark Haddon's <I>The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time</I>, a story written in the first-person voice of Christopher Boone, an autistic 15-year-old.

I forgot to mention something else that the Musical Fidelity pieces seem to add to my system's performance: <i>depth</i>.

To some people, music doesn't make any sense. There's a name for that: amusia. Auntie Beeb 'splains it to us.