I check in on aggregator blog <I>Locust Street</I> every week and it's almost always worth the visit. The last two weeks, however, have been extraordinary. Last week's deep excavation of the "Dry Bones" meme was perfect, but this week's theme of party girls is even better. Go—but only if you have a few hours to spend.
<I>Classical Values</I> takes a sharp look at the much ballyhooed honeybee blight. "The bees that seem to be suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder are the ones that get boxed up and trucked around, and they've been kept going for decades with regular dustings of miticides. Whether this is good for bees and how long they can be expected to compete with wild insects is of course debatable."
Days pass, there are weddings and funerals, pink flowers smile everywhere, and we get closer and closer to the 2007 Home Entertainment Show.
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Tonight, John Atkinson is going to give me an honest to God <I>production</I> copy of the Attention Screen <I>Live at Merkin Hall</I> CD. You need to get one too. In the meantime, here's an interview with one of the truly great improvisors, Keith Jarrett.
MIT Media Lab has posted a survey seeking to discover "what words people use to describe sounds—and whether everyone uses a common vocabulary, or whether the choice of words is related to a person's musical or cultural background—and how the chosen words relate to a sound's timbral characteristics."
Subway maps of the world, rendered to scale. Why do I link to that? Because it's got subways . . . and maps . . . and, uh, scale.
<I>Spinner</I> picks 'em. Yeah, it's a list, but this one has the songs embedded, so you can hear the ones you don't know—or the ones you love, for that matter.
Audiophiles treasure the time spent listening to their systems—but how often do you get to listen to an entire album uninterrupted?
John Mitchell, an outside counsel for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM), warns that Florida and Utah have passed second-hand goods legislation (familiarly known as "pawn-shop laws") that could make the buying and selling of used CDs extremely unprofitable for stores and inconvenient for consumers trying to unload music they no longer wish to own.
It began with an email from reader Ed Hoffman. "I was looking for a Pass Labs dealer and found out that Pass Labs has dumped all of their dealers around the country. Do you have any information about what is going on?"