Wes Phillips

If you're geeky enough to get both references, you're my kind of guy.

Joey deVilla, aka Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, is disgruntled (trust me, Accordion Guy is at his best when he's not gruntled). His beef? The fundraising dinner held last night for Canadian MP Sam Bulte, aka Hollywood's MP, because of the perhaps coincidental linkage between her advocacy of extremely restrictive copyright legislation and her acceptance of financial support (57% of her campaign war chest) from institutions such as the Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association, Canadian Publishers Council, and the Entertainment Software Alliance.

Geva believes that measurements don't lie—well, he allows that they can fib, but that a competent engineer should be able to interpret them with great accuracy. He uses aluminum and ballistic allow instead of wood or MDF, he said, because they are the "most resonant free, deadest, stiffest, strongest, least diffractive, and most sonically desirable materials ever found."

You take a 600 Hz tone and adjust the amplitude and phase relationships among three speakers. My buddy Jeff swears he saw this done in Jersey with just two loudspeakers, but I think he was just listening at such high volume that his eyeballs were compressing.

"An audience member unhappy with the sound in their part of the auditorium can change seats, but we [concert pianists] cannot," Byron Janis says. "Therefore the position of the piano on stage is of utmost importance—moving it only a foot in either direction can make an enormous difference in the sound and therefore in the performance."

That's Spengler's argument in this Asia Times essay, at any rate. Within that discussion, however, Spengler muses about why modern art is so much more popular with the public than "modern" music—and that's the hmmm part of his essay—that music, unlike the plastic arts, can only be experienced within time.

On the eve of the film's UK release, Neil Gaiman muses on how he came to write Stardust.