Wes Phillips

Classical Values 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."

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Tonight, John Atkinson is going to give me an honest to God production copy of the Attention Screen Live at Merkin Hall 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."

Spinner 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.

Freida Hughes is less than reverent about a Robert Service poem. She's right—the callow lad got bent out of shape when his booty call wasn't the idyll he had imagined.

Because I thought I was the boss of him, that's why.

"These syllables might be nonsensical, but they are telling and resonant."