Rockabye Baby

Tinkly instrumental renditions of Radiohead songs meant to serve as lullabies for babies? It's a wonderful idea for adults but sure seems like a terrible thing to unleash on our young. I do suppose the removal of the lyrics makes the listening experience the ultimate double-entendre. Peter Szendy would be fascinated by these arrangements. We can listen to makers of children's music listening to Radiohead and then babies listening to the innocent instrumental versions while the adults fill in the ominous words as they listen.

contradictions

While the progress of the Plan Daly City project is encouraging, I had to snicker at one of the conclusions from the city-wide survey:

In terms of top priorities, survey respondents selected “Stricter code enforcement”, “Less traffic”, and “More parking” as the top First Choices of what they would like to see changed in Daly City. “More for-sale home choices”, “Preservation of historic buildings”, “More luxury housing”, and “More public art” were the least selected First Choices from the overall respondent pool.

Our media really reports significant news these days. The residents of Obama, Japan believe it, glasses and all.

not just the American picket fence dream anymore

A massive (and massively costly) fence is going up along the border near San Diego to certain environmental detriment. I hardly want to know what the ancient American Indians would have had to say about our recent wave of anti-immigration sentiments. Had they built fences, would we be here to lock others out today?

http://www.dezeen.com/2008/08/07/global-warming-rug-by-nel-for-nanimarquina/

There went 27,000 marijuana plants down the drain in Sonoma. Woops.

How can we bear to eat Ethiopian cuisine these days without feeling the cutting irony that the Ethiopians themselves are barely staying alive on one meal a day?

I'd love to go for a walk among the treetops -- literally -- on the Kew tree top walkway. What a brilliant idea.

The UK has sent $10 million to Myanmar for relief after the cyclone, and the US has thus far appropriated only $3 million.

cake lyrics come true

Did someone take Cake's lyrics about fuzzy dice too far?

windoze

Internal IBM documents show that some Macs are now being used internally. "One advantage cited: less reliance on Windows."

La Galerie de Pierre Bergé & Associés

Look what's appearing on the Sablon in Brussels not far from Pierre Marcolini.

MRE, one of the funniest Wikipedia articles I've ever read.

Living at home

Not just a Belgian phenomenon?

Yet another project from the Beijing sandbox: Architect Steven Holl is building a small version of the city I've envisioned twice my fiction: a forest of highrises connected by aerial throughways.

"Lantos had assumed his committee chairmanship [of the House Foreign Affairs Committee] just a year [ago], when Democrats retook control of Congress. He said then that in a sense his whole life had been a preparation for the job." A sad time for our representative Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, to pass away of cancer.

Am I just too old-fashioned or hippie? Some of these "money-saving" suggestions from NYT are great; others make me sad. Desert local retailers? Is this how globalization has trickled down to the average American?

We had a fine powder in the evening, but later after my clavichord jury it began to drizzle. The resulting slightly solidified surface of the powdery snow gave it the fascinating consistency of old cake frosting. It was the right color too.

leaf crunchers unite!

This is what makes video gamers relish wrecking and pedestrians crunch leaves underfoot in the fall. I could hardly put it better: "W.H. Auden once warned that poets make lousy politicians, because they're way too entranced by apocalyptic spectacle. I think he was right, but the truth is this poetic hunger exists in almost everyone. After a 40-hour week of sitting in a cubicle, shuffling Word documents and being robotically polite, any reasonable human needs some catharsis -- some full-body shock of the illicit. Full-bore destruction in video games serves the need admirably."

The TSA needs a copyeditor if it's started its own blog and can't figure out the difference between Everyday and Every Day.

Postaplast is clearly what our house needs to stop missing deliveries. The design, built to last the harshest Norwegian winters, wouldn't be out of line for Rochester either.