By John on February 22, 2012 |
I’ve been thinking for a while of doing theme-type Midweek Music Breaks for a little variety, such as one on car music: songs about cars. As opposed to conventional “road trip” music, I mean, or songs by groups named after cars (like The Fleetwoods, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and, uh, The Cars). I may still do [...]
Posted in Hearing, Looking Backward, Midweek Music Break, Music | Tagged audio, Beep Beep, Cadillac, cars, listening, monaural sound, Nash Rambler, novelty songs, Rambler, The Playmates |
By John on February 20, 2012 |
[Image: "Webster's New Inner Diction" (2007), by Brian Dettmer] From Neil Gaiman’s Twitter feed, I learned of the artwork of Brian Dettmer. Dettmer uses surgical tools — scalpel, tweezers, and such — to dig down into books and other media (such as cassette tapes), revealing deep layers of what might or might not be meaning in [...]
Posted in Art & Photography, Books as Books | Tagged books as art, Brian Dettmer |
By John on February 18, 2012 |
[Image: The Beginning of Everything: Remembering Distance (oil on linen, 90 x 180 cm, 2010), by Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox] That’s what it said (on what would have been the little placard on what would have been his desk — if he had required a desk in the first place): The Librarian.
Posted in Art & Photography, Short Fiction, The Propagational Library | Tagged Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, matter, space, the universe, time |
By John on February 17, 2012 |
[Image: illustration from a December 20101 post, "The Time Travelling Brain," at the Neuroskeptic blog. The orange-highlighted region of the brain is apparently used both in remembering the past, and imagining the future. See also this article in Discover.] in spite of everything which breathes and moves, since Doom (with white longest hands neatening each crease) will [...]
Posted in Poetry, Ruminations, Science & Medicine, whiskey river Fridays | Tagged Alan Watts, E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Spires, Mark Strand, memory, Neuroskeptic, Ptak Science Books, the future |
By John on February 15, 2012 |
[Image: "Ciara and Conor [Brady], acoustic set, Shadow Road Shining launch at Sugar Club, Dublin, 13 May 2011″ (from her FB page)] The [mostly imaginary] scene: Dublin, Ireland, in the offices of a large publishing firm, sometime in the still young twenty-first century. An experienced, highly respected editor sits looking dreamily out a window of her [...]
Posted in Midweek Music Break, Music, The Business, Writing | Tagged Ciara Sidine |
By John on February 12, 2012 |
We’re thinking of physically reconfiguring our network equipment here at the house. Currently, the DSL modem and router are upstairs in my office — at the far end of the house — where they’ve been since we moved here ten years ago. Since then, things have changed: The Missus no longer has a desktop computer. [...]
Posted in Computers, Everyday Life, Phones (Cellular and Otherwise), Tech, The Internet, The Missus, Writing | Tagged home decor, networking |
By John on February 10, 2012 |
[See the note at the foot of this post for information about this video.] From whiskey river: I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. There’s a certain humor in realizing that. I can never figure out the kind of tie to put on in the morning. I don’t have any strategy or [...]
Posted in Cartoons & Animation, Poetry, Ruminations, whiskey river Fridays | Tagged John Green, Jos Ley, Leonard Cohen, Louise Glück, Mark Twain, mathematics, surprise, Tomas Tranströmer, trefoil knots |
By John on February 8, 2012 |
Thanks to all the new(ish) music I’ve been listening to over the last couple years, I’ve found myself a fan of a genre I didn’t even know existed. It’s sort of a loose super-genre, actually: Americana or “roots music,” incorporating elements of bluegrass, folk, country/western, blues, rock… The instrumentation and arrangement lean acoustic-wards, and often [...]
Posted in Humor, Midweek Music Break, Music, Politics | Tagged Hayes Carll, men and women |
By John on February 4, 2012 |
In yesterday’s post ruminating about questions whose answers (at least in theory) may be more obvious than they first seem, I included a fifteen-point “meme” about movies; I didn’t actually respond to the meme there. In a comment, Jules asked what my choices would have been. Here y’go.
Posted in Movies, The Online World | Tagged Internet memes, memes |
By John on February 3, 2012 |
[Image: xkcd #936, on password strength. Click image to enlarge; see xkcd itself for the full six panels and the punchline.] From whiskey river: This accidental meeting of possibilities calls itself I. I ask: what am I doing here? And, at once, this I becomes unreal. (Dag Hammarskjöld [source]) …and: Ch’ui the draftsman Could draw more [...]
Posted in Comics, Humor, Language, Movies, Music, Poetry, Ruminations, The Online World, Theater, whiskey river Fridays | Tagged Chuang Tzu, Dag Hammarskjöld, Duncan J. Watts, Ellen Steinbaum, Internet memes, Stephen Sondheim, Tim Johnson, xkcd |