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Adam Sohmer writes: "A fine humanitarian has gone through the effort of aggregating most known Zappa videos residing on YouTube, and there's quite a bit on tap. Check out the professionally shot videos of the Yellow Shark concert and wonder why this performance has yet to see a formal release. Or just sift through the page and cancel the rest of the day's appointments."
My office window is almost precisely one Huckleberry wide. You'd be amazed how much of the house has been measured by that metric.
Of course they should—wasn't that the core of George Smiley's appeal?James Bond may be fun to watch, but he'd never really last in the field.
Jon Carroll is always worth reading, but you really don't want to miss a column that has this lede: "This is such a wonderful story. It should serve as an example to us all, and as a shining light to the young. Yes, you can do something positive for society, while still breaking the law and cheesing everybody off! It's win-win."
Sam Tellig doesn't call the office often. In the seven years that I've been at Stereophile, Sam has called only a handful of times. When he does call, however, it's serious. Sam just called.
I imagine he had to pry himself from his listening chair to do so, but he did. Most likely, in fact, it was the music that inspired him to pick up the phone.
"Hello Stephen. It's Sam Tellig."
"Oh! Hi Sam. How are you?"
"I'm fine. Yourself?"
"I'm well. What's up?"
"Stephen, have you read my latest column?"
"Yeah."
"About the LFD…
PBS has posted a site dedicated to Nikola Tesla, my candidate for coolest scientist ever. Among other things, it includes a virtual tour o the Niagara Falls electrical generating plant and a fascinating hint that Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was created out of fear that the USSR had perfected his charged-particle beam weapon (you see, there's this huge controversy over what happened to his papers after his death).
Exploring the site is like venturing into a science museum's attic, it's chock full of fascinating tidbits—such as Tesla's death mask and documents from his FBI files.
Sigh, The Golden Compass opens this week and the kooks are out denouncing it as "atheist propaganda." I read—and greatly enjoyed—Pullman's trilogy and I thought it was more an argument with Milton than with God himself.
Laura Miller is one of the few writers who actually appears to have read and understood His Dark Materials. Even better, she spoke with British clergy who also had read it and "got it," to the extent that they welcomed a work of ideas that led to discussions on the big issues of life, death, mortality, and humanity's place in the cosmos.
Moreover, as one British…