So there I am, sitting eating my lunch, watching the news on TV, waiting like the slavering dog that I am for more Mel goes Mad, when none other than Alice Cooper a.k.a. Vince Furnier, he of the large pearly whites and the exquisitely died hair, comes on CNN and begins batting his bright eyes and cheerfully expounding on his new youth center in Phoenix.
Precisely because you're not miserable enough in the first place, if I follow this chap's reasoning.
A medical mystery solved?
Given its ubiquity, strength, and lightness, why don't they build bikes out of bamboo?
Yeah, that's a shock to anybody who has ever seen any of those commercials on late-night TV. But here's the thing, this Claire Hoffman article from <I>The Los Angeles Times</I> is a wonderful piece of participatory journalism.
It's Monday, I have a Jon Carroll column that discusses a new book on the differences between men and women, and it reveals the secret to stimulating a "major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm." So how could I not link to it?
Blind loudspeaker listening tests are hard work, not least because usually, most of the models being auditioned fail to light any musical sparks. But back in the spring of 1991, when a small group of <I>Stereophile</I> writers were doing blind tests for a group speaker review, one speaker did light up smiles on the listeners' faces, including my own. (We don't talk during our blind tests, but it's more difficult to keep body language in check.) Once the results were in, we learned that the speaker that got the music right in that test was the diminutive ES11 from Epos in England (footnote 1).
The La Luce turntable's elegant form usually stops audiophiles dead in their tracks. Then comes a long, low "Wow." I'm hardly immune myself. And that's not even considering the sound, which has always been wonderful, as it was in the Joseph Audio/Cardas room at CES '98.
The conventional wisdom that "bigger is better" doesn't always hold true in audio. High-end speaker systems, for example, have evolved in both directions—some designs have grown enormous while others have almost disappeared entirely. Which trend do you favor?