Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Performed by cats :-)

Silly, of course. But it made my daughter laugh. Me, too:

Hamlet: What’s the news?

Rosencrantz: None, my lord, but that the world’s grown honest.

Hamlet: Then is doomsday near . . .

Technorati Tags: Friday catblogging

I heard a cut from this 1997 CD, featuring Mary Schneider, Australia’s Queen of Yodeling, on PBS the other morning and realized that my admittedly puny CD collection had a GAPING hole that had to be filled pronto.

I mean, yodeling the William Tell Overture? Rossini’s Large al factotum? The only question is why it took someone this long to figure out it HAD to be done.

Technorati Tags: music

But B-movie biology just doesn’t hold up to the physics.

The incredible shrinking man wouldn’t have had trouble wielding a needle to fight a spider. There’s no way Racquel could have manuevered her little ship in Fantastic Voyage. King Kong couldn’t have stood on his hind legs for long at all without exhausting himself. Mothra would be grounded on windy days. And on and on . . .

Technorati Tags: monster movies, physics

Via 2blowhards, a student short that explores stop motion photography.

Filmed at the University of Rochester river campus :-)

Technorati Tags: stop motion, film short

I’ll never build a sand castle again. These sculptures are amazing.

From the Vancouver Sun World Championships of Sand Sculpture Competition & Exhibition.

Technorati Tags: sand sculpture

A kid’s brain, anyway.

Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training.

The findings, published today (20 September 2006) in the online edition of the journal Brain [1], show that not only do the brains of musically-trained children respond to music in a different way to those of the untrained children, but also that the training improves their memory as well. After one year the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ.

Very small study. But interesting.

Technorati Tags: music

That would be the Dummies “how to” book series.

The only bad news: it’s a New York Times article so registration required.

Technorati Tags: writing, books

When I was younger, I let my emotions drive my choices (often to my eventual sorrow, sigh) and I suppose I still do to some extent but at least now I make an effort to engage my emotional responses as consciously as I can — part of which involves trying to free them such that they flow their courses more easily, reveal themselves more fully & thereby reveal also the contours of the landscape their flowing paints.

Since I’m by nature a kinesthetic person this involves paying close attention to where feelings lodge. Lately I’ve also jettisoned the distinction between purely physical feelings — e.g. pain or tension — and emotions. My working theory is that there is no difference, really: the physical body acts as a tangible map of the emotions; physical sensations are simply a more intense inclination of the map’s contours.

So I look for tools that help me bridge through my body to the emotions beneath it, and here’s one of the best I’ve found: a book of execises that combine yoga and the stimulation of accupressure points. Awkward title, unfortunately — Acu-Yoga???? — but I can forgive that; it’s one of the most valuable books I own.

Whether the techniques described in the book actually “do” anything is, of course, entirely a matter of speculation. Perhaps the exercises are more a way to ritualize a routine of auto-suggestion and physical relaxation.

But it works. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it.

Technorati Tags: yoga, emotions

If you answered “women,” you need to read this.

This topic is of ongoing interest at Mark Liberman’s Language Log blog; as he notes here:

There certainly are psychological and neurological differences between men and women, sometimes big ones. But even when they aren’t promoting their ideas on the basis of “facts” that are apparently false, authors like Sax and Brizendine use a set of rhetorical tricks that tend to make sex differences seem bigger and more consequential than they really are.

Sax is Leonard Sax; he wrote Why Gender Matters, which posits that men are “emotional children;” Louann Brizendine wrote The Female Brain, which asserts a slew of biologically-based differences between the brains of human males and females.

Technorati Tags: gender differences

On Bibliobuffet, Henry Carrigan has a review of Darlene Harbour Unrue’s 2005 biography of Porter, The Life of an Artist.

Here’s the review.

Carrigan calls the book “masterful.” I’m in.

Technorati Tags: book review, literary biography