A few months ago, I entered a phase in which the only kinds of music I really wanted to hear were classical and bluegrass.
If you are in such a phase, or even if you are not, your new hero is Edgar Meyer. I’ve been listening to Appalachian Journey over and over, and exploring related classical-bluegrass hybrids. Listening to this stuff is like watching a ballroom full of people in tuxedoes and silk dresses suddenly break out square dancing: exuberant, democratic, and fantastic.
I was inspired by seeing a rerun of Charlie Rose interviewing the physicist Lisa Randall to buy and read her book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions.
Her innovation, if I understand it correctly, is the idea that there could be not only extra dimensions, but extra dimensions that are infinite in size, which we have not previously perceived because we are not physiologically designed to do so. This is the idea that strikes me as so sweeping, yet so simple, that it feels like it might turn out to be right. It’s like when people started to accept that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, despite how it looks to us here on earth.
Apparently the Large Hadron Collider will enable experiments that can help support or disprove the theory. I like to have something to look forward to. Now that the final Harry Potter book is available, I’ll start looking forward to the advent of the Large Hadron Collider. Odds are it won’t destroy the universe.
I’ve started tracking the statistics and search strings for this site.
For whoever was looking for the slow loris/grant money article, I’ve put that back up: Slow Loris.
Photo by Wallyg via flickr.
Recently, former neighbor Kari’s new band Aquanaut vs. Cosmonaut came to town. In addition to having chosen a really good name, they sounded great live, with the kind of sound that swirls around the room and makes you feel like you have voyaged somewhere, even though you are standing still.
At the end of last year, one of the songs I liked to play over and over again was “Our Life Is Not a Movie Or Maybe” by Okkervil River. It suited my mood then. Also, though they’re not an L.A. band, it’s a perfect song to listen to while driving around Hollywood.
It was odd to finally see the video for it. I like music videos, and it’s a good video. It’s just that I already had a movie inside my head to go with the song. Then again, that’s what it’s about.
Q: Snow, It is 2008. Are you really just now starting a blog?
A: No, dude. I started a blog in 2000. See October 2000, November 2000, December 2000,January 2001, February 2001, and April-June 2001.
It seems the big thing to do on the Internet back then was to talk about the Internet. No, the navigation does not work anymore; I don’t feel the need to keep the full site up. Yes, that is entirely hand-coded HTML. I think I stole a lot of the layout from peterme.com, though. At least I borrowed it from the guy who coined the term “blog.”.
And then I did a bunch of other stuff for seven years.