Walls of Time

I just love Ricky Skagg’s version of this tune but, before performing it himself, Peter Rowan tells the story in the clip below of how he and Bill Monroe wrote this tune after having driven all night on their bus traveling north from the Grand Ole Opry:

Go Malamud

Cory Doctorow writes the following about Carl Malamud: Carl is the beloved “rogue librarian” who has done so much to liberate tax-funded government works, from movies to court rulings to the text of laws themselves, putting these public domain works on the Internet where they belong. By the People is an inspirational and education piece…

Neil Postman

From Wikipedia: Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who…

Slide on Gastineau Ave

If we still lived in Juneau, this is where we’d still be parking our Subaru wagon. Last week, the Soobi would have been buried under this:

Pinballistic De-Evolution

Jason Kottke mentioned this post about the economics of pinball, which brings up questions about more than just what our all-time high scores were: Black Knight brought pinball to a new level, literally speaking because it was among the first games with ramps and elevated flippers, but even more importantly because it brought a new…

Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire

Author Michael Pollan says: The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow…

Taxing the Artist

The five months of furious short-story writing in 1923-24 had left him with a stake of $7,000. In Great Neck, that would only cover two and a half months of expenses. How could he stretch the $7,000 to gain the time to finish Gatsby? Earlier, as he was struggling to save, a friend wrote from…

The Pines : Tremolo

The Pines‘ latest album, Tremolo, has earned some great reviews fresh out of the chute, including Penguin Eggs, which reviewed it in this month’s issue: Potent, poignant, minimalist country from Iowans David Huckfelt and Benson Ramsey (son of Greg Brown sideman Bo, who produced this record). The duo spin spare, haunting melodies and imagistic words…

Humans Swimming

Are you a human? Do you like to swim? How about free-diving? How about static free diving?

The Great Battle of Internetâ„¢ (continued)

Condoleezza Rice’s missive to the EU By Kieren McCarthy Published Friday 2nd December 2005 09:07 GMT The World Summit in Tunis last month was overshadowed by the global argument over internet governance. Its biggest controversy came with the proposition put forward by the EU a month earlier that there be a new inter-governmental body that…