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"Last fall, Condé Nast Traveler aviation correspondent Barbara S. Peterson applied to work as a Transportation Security Administration screener. Her mission: to investigate reports that despite a five-year, $20 billion overhaul of the passenger screening system, checkpoint personnel are failing at the job. Being hired was only her first surprise. Peterson's two months at the airport revealed how this overtaxed but dedicated workforce copes with equipment shortages, budget cuts, and record numbers of (not very pleasant) passengers. Here is an unprecedented look at the reality of America's last…
Cartoonist Doug Marlette has made me laugh until milk shot out my nose. He has also made me squirm when he has pilloried my hobbyhorses. I've always figured that political humor was at its best when it made you laugh at stuff you believed in—anybody can raise a chuckle over something you're already contemptuous of.
Marlette hits one out of the park with this CJR essay (adapted from his new book)—I snorted and barked so hard while reading it that my wife came into our kitchen to see if I was having a fit.
"What would Marlette drive? ... If I drew you a picture it might look like…
Charlie Brooker doesn't like his new phone.
"The phone . . . immediately began elbowing me in the ribs. It seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind. It starts gently—a pinch of annoyance here, an inconvenience there - but before long the steady drip, drip, drip of minor frustrations begins to affect your quality of life, like a mouth ulcer, or a stone in your boot, or the lingering memory of love gone sour."
Joe Harley sends along this YouTube goodie wherein Hans Groiner helpfully "fixes" the music of Thelonious Monk.
Break me a freakin' give, I muttered to myself as I clicked on the URL to the above-titled article. How stupid is this going to be?
Not stupid at all, as it turned out. Amusing and informative—and very smart. Plus, it gives this audiophile the rare opportunity to think, boy, what a geek about somebody else.
In the dawn of the record era, album covers were based on the covers of photographic albums. Then Alex Steinweiss proposed to Columbia that it "embellish the 78 RPM record albums (covers) with original artwork (drawings and paintings)." An art form—and an industry—was born.
Via Jeff Wong.
Not too many people know this about him — not even his closest friends, not even his mother, not even his wife — but John Atkinson, editor of Stereophile, is a huge fan of The Fucking Champs. In fact, JA sent me this clip1.
In it, you'll see "the Champs," as I so politically correctly like to call them, totally shred the fuck out of Henry Francis Lyte and William Henry Monk's 1847 megahit, "Abide With Me," before jumping headfirst into the glistening ocean of victory metal that is "Extra Man," my personal favorite Champs composition.
It's uncommon for the Champs to mix…
The Daily Mail maps the world with cartograms: resizing the countries according to different measures. For example, did you know that Ugandans drink the most alcohol per adult?
I spent an afternoon interviewing the Emerson Quartet when they released their epic Shostakovich cycle.They were delightful. They're dedicated musicians, of course, but also witty and welcoming—just good company.
Grow A Brain alerted me to this great performance guide to the Bartók quartets for performers and music lovers.
I love this Sobremesa entry.
This relationship between plants and "energy" is something I think about every now and then. I have a plant in my living room. It's a regular plant. You see them everywhere. I don't know what it's called. It's the same kind of plant my grandmother used to have growing all wildly around her kitchen, the "vines" [not sure if that's the right word] wrapping themselves along the cabinets and falling down the side of the refrigerator. When I was younger, I thought it was just a Puerto Rican grandma thing, but I later came to find that…