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Well, if you're tired of being jolly, you could go see No Country For Old Men, which will counteract any amount of Whooville saccharine. John Patterson has a good time with the Coen brothers.
It occurs to me that in the three years I've been posting Friday cat blogging, I have never photographed Bagheera asleep. That wary look of hers is as close to complacent as she gets.
For a cat who only drinks water, Huckleberry certainly does a passable imitation of a drunken stupor.
I gotta tell ya, hon':
When the morning sun shines through my white curtains like it did today, there's nothing more I'd rather do than just sit down and feel it and listen to music and think of things. Things. I think I'd listen to Joanna Newsom followed by Bill Callahan followed by Richard Buckner followed by Iron & Wine followed by I don't know what else and it'd all be good.
I think I'd smile and think about good things. I was thinking about how my mom recently purchased a new enormous flat-screen television to replace the other new enormous flat-…
Now that Christmas has come and gone, and my need to hear Bobby Helms' "Jingle Bells Rock" has subsided — I'm not sure but I think it has something to do with those electric guitar flourishes—, it's seems an appropriate time to say something about the continuing and astonishing turmoil in the record business which according to most sources experienced a nearly 20 percent decline in sales of physical product compared with last Christmas.
I was at a holiday party populated by teenagers, who I immediately played reporter on to find what they were listening to and buying. To my…
When I picked up the mail on Saturday, I had an unexpected package. It contained Vance Dickason's Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, 7th Edition. Oh boy!
When I built my first pair of loudspeakers, there wasn't anything like this comprehensive tutorial on speaker building, so I built a pair of boxes the size of the speakers I thought I'd like, went down to Allied Radio and bought the biggest woofer that would fit, a slightly smaller midrange driver, and a multi-cell horn tweeter and just cut holes in the front baffle and wired 'em up.
It sounded—of course—like the dog's breakfast…
The Economist has an uncredited article about great charts. They're all familiar to readers of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantative Information, but they are great charts.
On the corner of 38th and Madison, just outside the Stereophile offices, there's a street advertisement which reads:
Start Talking Before They Start Drinking!It cracks me up every time. The ad depicts a kid, you see—he must be about five years old—looking very sad, looking like he's had one hell of a rough day, looking, in fact, like he needs a drink. If you don't talk to that kid quick, he'll be at the gin like it's Kool-Aid. But I shouldn't laugh. It's very serious.
And it raises a good point: It's best to start talking to the kids…
Technology Review, which is one of the magazines I not only eagerly await, but read from cover to cover, published a 14 page screed against network news by John Hockenberry in the January/February issue.
Hockenberry, now at MIT's Media Lab, worked for NBC News for 12 years "working up" to a position on Dateline. He observes that Edward R. Murrow's "This Is London" broadcasts were revolutionary in the way they delivered immediate reporting to an America that had always felt justifiably—indeed, ideologically—distant from the rest of the world. "
"Communication technologies…