LATEST ADDITIONS

I've linked to <I>Locust Street</I> before, but this is one of its best posts ever: a moving account of Buddy Holly's last days, with MP3s of some unreleased home recordings.

Quick, name your favorite equation! For most of us, it's E = mc<SUP>2</SUP>, but Euler's <I>e<SUP>in</SUP></I> + 1 = 0 is the one "everyone should know."

Though I was doing my best to give passengers room to exit the train, I was hopelessly in the way. On some mornings, it's impossible to stand on the train and <i>not</i> be in the way. Everyone scrambles toward the open doors, as if departing this train, right now &#151; right now! &#151; means the world. The world. I think it's because I hate this, that I try to do the opposite. When it's my turn to depart, I move carefully and slowly, perhaps in some futile attempt to show others how gracefully done it can be. Fellow passengers, there is another way. Watch as I move through these doors with such ease and finesse.

<I>The Guardian</I> has some further thoughts on "meh." All of which simply points out that <A HREF="http://heideas.blogspot.com/2005/03/beyond-embiggens-and-cromulent.html…; was right when she said that the Simpsons are all about linguistics.

There's a nice interview with <I>New Yorker</I> editor Remnick in <I>The Independent</I>. As a writer, I suppose I should mention how much I identify with all kinds of questions of craft revealed here, but, really, what I most identified with was his anecdote about listening to Bob Dylan records and discovering T. S. Eliot and Rimbaud.

Sometimes our favorite music sounds like crap, and sometimes the best-sounding work in our collection is an artistic failure, but we keep the thing anyway. Forget about the quality of the music, what percentage of your music collection sounds great?

<I>Oooohh! Aaaahh! Coochy-coo!</I> are not the usual spontaneous reactions from hard-boiled audio journalists to the unveiling of a hi-fi component. Nor is the Silverstone Circuit, the self-proclaimed Home of British Motor Racing, the usual venue for such a launch. But the news that UK audio manufacturer <A HREF="http://www.meridian.co.uk">Meridian</A&gt; and Ferrari were cuddling up together on a joint project was enough to drag yours truly halfway across the country to deep Northamptonshire on a miserably wet February morning.