A Matter of Scale
Subway maps of the world, rendered to scale. Why do I link to that? Because it's got subways . . . and maps . . . and, uh, scale.
Wes Phillips
Words and Music
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."
Countdown to Ecstasy
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.
With a Hey, and a Ho, and a Hey-Nonny-No
"These syllables might be nonsensical, but they are telling and resonant."
Why Is This Cat Laughing?
Because I thought I was the boss of him, that's why.
What's That?
Bagheera's bug huntin'!
Duck-Billed Platitudes
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.
O'Neill at Sing-Sing
Eugene O'Neill is currently having a resurgence everywhere from prisons to Broadway (John Atkinson ranks the Old Vic production of Moon For the Misbegotten as one of his most intense theatrical experiences). John Patrick Diggens argues that O'Neill's themes of deceit and desire are particularly timely for 'Muricans today.
On the Evolution of Style
I've been reading Chet Raymo's Walking Zero, a meditation on the history of science focussed through a walk along the prime meridian in the UK. It's a lovely book, one I tend to linger over, reading a chapter and then mulling over it for a few days. Highly recommended.
Sky Racers
In the 1920s and '30s, fliers would race their home-built and "suicidally overpowered" single engine aircraft—sometimes in front of 60,000 spectators. The Granville Brothers' Gee Bee Model Z was little more than a massive motor with stubby little wings attached, but it paved the way for the fast fighters the Air Corps put aloft in WWII.