June 2011
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Little parlour game: talk about a piece of music...
Language, according to Benveniste, is the only semiotic system capable of interpreting another semiotic system. How, then, does language manage when it has to interpret music? Alas, it seems, very badly. If one looks at the normal practice of music criticism (or, which is often the same thing, of conversations “on” music), it can readily be seen that a work (or its performance) is only ever...
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Funny Thought Experiment
fuzzyutopias:
On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the...
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"Compliments of the Chef"
Waiter: ...and, here's a shot of Cherry-Limeaid, compliments of the chef...
Me: Yeah? So, the Chef just saw us walk in and told you to send this over to us?
Waiter: No, we make a bucket of it and tell you its from the Chef.
Apples ≠ Apples
Me: It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Marke: No, it's an apples-to-cocks comparison.
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No, but seriously... TWO of them.
me: They paid me in Eames chairs. How rad is that?
Nick: That could be the most hipster thing I've ever heard of.
me: Thanks, I pushed up my Ray-Bans right after I typed that.
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“I use Facebook every single day. Because of its disgust and distaste for borders...”
– Jason Scott outlines the reasons why culture archivists should hate Facebook.
This is from May but is so good that it’s worth mentioning now anyway.
btw, the ideas from above quote are in his text but has been extensively reordered by me.
via dj
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HitRECord in a Nutshell (a rather large, imposing...
embracetherandom:
(This is written in response to a couple anonymous posters I’ve had asking me to explain to them how to use hitRECord. I hope I do it justice.)
Congratulations! You just joined HitRECord! What are you going to do next?! You have no idea, right? Well, don’t worry, we’ve all been there. I’ve been on the site for almost 2 years now and still sometimes feel overwhelmed by its...
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WatchThe Brick Bell Choir
Maxx got this great set of bells in the key of C for her 2nd birthday, which proved endlessly entertaining to all of us. After serenading Maxx to bed with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, we then moved on to tackling Adele’s Someone Like You, and then as the evening was winding down, Seth orchestrated our impromptu bell choir in a beautiful rendition of Emily’s Theme...
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“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness...”
– from the Author’s Note, in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
Reminds me of something G. K. Chesterton wrote:
“We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we...
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