via Mefi

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I picked up some books from BPL the other day. One of them was Marco Polo: from Venice to Xanadu. Tucked inside the outer cover was a checkout slip from the previous patron that listed two books: Marco Polo and The Wreck of the Medusa: the most famous sea disaster of the nineteenth century.

The book that I'm reading right now? The Wreck of the Medusa. It begins with a macabre tale about how Theodore Gericault collected dead bodies so he could recreate the horror of the raft in his studio.

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Last night, WNYC's Overnight Music played a cool piece by Harry Partch called Rotate the Body in All Its Planes -- Ballad for Gymnasts. Here is the the story behind it.

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As you know, I like to keep up on the latest musical trends. On Wednesday we headed down Hawthorne Boulevard to celebrate Mrs. Soul's new part-time librarian job (yay!). We wandered by the Hawthorne Theatre, where a large touring band bus was parked. Looking up at the marquee, we saw that the feature act for the evening was one Rotting Christ. Milling around on the street and parking lot were a handful of gentlemen that, I believe were said Greek black metal band.

They were amiably chatting amongst themselves, smoking a few cigarettes and enjoying the lunar eclipse. I wonder why...

Note in the Wikipedia article my new new favorite music: Viking metal!

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Even Mariachi bands support Obama!

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The list for the 2008 Tournament of Books has been released and I have a lot more reading to do this year than I did last year. Of the books on the list, I've only completely read one and one other book I tossed aside in disgust.

Basically, the list is made up of books that I've been putting off reading, like The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Yao.

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Unfortunately science projects, courtesy photo basement.

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When I saw this article about down turns in Texas boom towns today in the NYT, I thought of this interesting article in The Atlantic about the future of the suburbs.

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Tired of talking to Ron Paul supporters and listening to them expound on the glorious virtues of the gold standard? Here's a nice concise item that outlines why reinstating the gold standard would be the gold standard of stupid public policy.

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Lyleman, stat guru, and all-around smart guy Bill James joined baseball legends Elden Auker, Fritz Brickell, Hap Dumont, Volney Paul, Don Lock, Mitch Webster and Ralph Terry in the Kansas Baseball Hall of Fame.

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Twenty years ago, this man asked the man in the mirror to make change. Did he? No, son. The man in the mirror didn't make a change.

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"We sell unlocked iPhones"

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John McCain is inspiring more people than Obama...

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Speaking of elections, I'd like to bring you all back to a bygone era, a day when an Onion piece like this one could be considered satire: January of 2001.

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You can imagine John McCain nationalists, Mike Huckabee fundamentalists, and Ron Paul Libertarians all getting behind the show and its singular imagining an all-American post-apocalypse.

They left out "Mr. Guapo-style liberals."

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Here's an interesting assessment of McCain.

The Washington Post looks at the "real" McCain.

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As if winning the Super Bowl wasn't enough, New York has once again topped Boston. This time it's on the Forbes list of most miserable cities in America. I'm surprised Tonganoxie didn't make the cut.

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The NYT has a slideshow dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Chevy Impala. Of course, they didn't have a photo of the 1978 Impala, a model that my family drove into the early 1990s. In high school I was embarrassed to be driven to school in car that looked exactly like the one pictured above.

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The Pew Research Center estimates that by 2020, 1 in 7 people in the United States will be foreign born. Personally, I'm OK with this. If we can't permanently fix social security, we might as well keep importing people to keep our system afloat.

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The NY Times has an article about the shrinking shrinking male model. 6'1" and 145 lbs? That's me!

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So, you happen to hear a friend of a friend or a sister of a co-worker or the loud-talker in line a) has a PhD in biology 2) really wants to teach lots of classes 3) would like to live in a small town in the beautiful wooded countryside.
Most of the time you (being an editor, doctor, programmer, engineer, artist or other Norloser type who doesn't live in a small town in the wooded countryside) have nothing to say to such a person.
Now you do.
Now you say, "I happen to know a great biology professor [you can take my word on that] who is chairing a search for more biology professors at her small college," and then you give him or her my e-mail address with instructions to contact me right away (or tell them to visit our web site),

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Politico.com has an article that tries to make sense of the superdelegates, and what impact they will have at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Awarding delegates on a proportional basis rather than a winner-take-all method was supposed to make things fair for the underdogs. The superdelegate idea was cooked up to make sure “'fairness' did not get out of hand." In other words, Candidate A could have more pledged delegates than Candidate B, but because Candidate B's husband and campaign chairman are superdelegates, White House interns may have to take up cigar smoking.

I have to wonder: would anyone care about this if the Writers Guild wasn't on strike?

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Amazing.

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It's been a joke for years that the Super Bowl pregame show is too long, but yesterday I saw a segment during the pregame show that was the apotheosis of the network time killer genre: NFL players reciting important documents from American history.

Witness the time killer, in all its frilly 18th century glory, here:

When I saw the guy with the wig and frilly cuffs writing with a quill, I fell over howling with laughter. OK, I exagerrate, but I did snicker quietly to myself.

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Two bits of news. First, the man himself, the linchpin of the devastating Stephenson Hall playbook standby known as the Flea Flickner, is posting on Norlos as Flick. No more lurking for you, Flick.

Second, one of these days I'm gonna get the photo thing at left working so that any of us can post photos, without going through me. The coding is testing my walnut-sized brain, but I hope to figure it out before the comet strikes and leads me to extinction.

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It's been a long time since I said I'd do this, but I finally got around to it. The Norlos Users Address Book is back online. The bad news: you have to re-enter your information. Lots of you have new stuff to type in, anyway. Here's how it works:

1) Address book site

2) When you create a new account, I get an email about it and I have to manually activate your account. This is just like before - it'll keep interlopers from finding out where we live and so on. If I can't tell who you are from the username and email you provided, I'll send a note to the email to give you a chance to prove yourself worthy.

3) When I've activated your account, you'll get an email about it saying you're okay to log in.

4) Return to the site and click the "Profile" link to enter all your stuff. Once you have at least a name entered in the profile, you'll show up in the list for other users to view.

This thing is brand new and barely tested, so if it breaks, send me an email about it. If you want to request a change in the address data available, let me know that, too.

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