Category: Other

BBC: “I’ve got the world’s longest tongue!” Indeed.

A couple of links this morning, some good, some bad, some just scary.

My friend John Vick, with whom I sang in the Virginia Glee Club and who was a housemate for a while back in Virginia, continues to do good things with his band Hello Swindon. They have a webcast today via Knot Radio from 10 to midnight Eastern time. Check it out.

There’s a pretty good Vladimir Nabokov web site that I just discovered yesterday called zembla. Lots of stuff about Nabokov and his works. Check it out. Now. 🙂

Finally, the scary-funny one. Seems that in the 1960s, the CIA was bugging
kitties so that they could eavesdrop on the Soviets. My favorite part: “They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that.” Of course this wouldn’t be a funny Cold War story without a really bad first test of the technology…

A very nice weekend. We were here in cold New England watching leaves change and drinking bad microbrew. It went from the low seventies to the mid forties over a two-day period. Lots of fun for the sinuses.

I was really sad to hear that “Man of Visions” Rev. Howard Finster, folk artist and (improbably) rock album cover artist, had passed away. The coverage of this event on SonicNet was one of the sadder pieces of journalism I’ve seen, though. No definition of why he was important: just “known to rock audiences for paintings that appear on the covers of …” Surely he deserved more respect. Any man capable of producing images like the cover of Little Creatures (below) was clearly more than just a “cover artist.”

And now for something … horrible

I refuse to say anything about this link, except that it puts the struggles for jobs that my classmates and I are experiencing into stunning perspective:

“Is that…?” we asked gingerly.
“It’s not soya bean,” replied Mr. Binatang grimly.
“Isn’t it dangerous?” we asked. Mr. Binatang was silent for a
while.
“They know I’m not there as an enemy,” he finally said…

“What!” you cry. “No words about the Windows XP launch?”

Well, I have a midterm exam today, so in lieu of a real update I present this short note courtesy of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. I’m not just a user; I’m also an alum.

From Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle:

He was working in the steaming pit of hell; day after day, week after week — until now, there was not an organ of his body that did its work without pain, until the sound of ocean breakers echoed in his head day and night, and the buildings swayed and danced before him as he went down the street.

And here I’m complaining about a finance midterm.