Wes Phillips

I read The San Francisco Gate every morning as part of my my get-ready-to-work ritual, mostly, I admit, for Jon Carroll's fine column, which teaches that wit and grace mean that you don't actually have to have anything to write about (but when he does have something to write about, it's always a corker). Now I've added the link below, which traces the adventures of reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who had the audacity to break the BALCO juicing scandal.

Well, no—but here's a handy chart showing you how animal sounds are portrayed in different languages. In Japanese, Huckleberry would be purring, "Goro goro."

Some unnamed genius has been blogging the Trojan War, and Achilles is now dead. Of course, he's been dead for centuries, but mother of Zeus, it seems so immediate this way.

John Marks sends along this article about the Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ, a 32-ton, 6398-pipe, three-story organ that I, for one, am going to have to make a sonic destination. Be sure to visit the photo essay and other links while you're reading about the Cooper organ—there's a ton of fascinating information there.

Vinyl Recorder has an interesting graphic on how groove modulation works. Check out the home page, too—VR sells DIY cutters!

Jon Iverson sends along this site devoted to the ideas of experimental film pioneer John Whitney, who wrote Digital Harmony, a book that has fascinated JI for years.

"They Thought You'd Say This: Unlikely phrases from real phrase books" is a hoot. When I lived in Peru, I collected tourist phrase books from our local second-hand book kiosk—a place that had a two-for-one trade-in policy on books in English. Since I was teaching ESL to folks that wanted to get jobs in tourism and on the police squad dedicated to tourist-related matters, I figured that they'd need to know a lot of these common phrases. I was stunned at how many books had unlikely scenarios, but few of them were as outlandish as in this article.