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.
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 . . .
Via 2blowhards, a student short that explores stop motion photography.
Filmed at the University of Rochester river campus :-)
I’ll never build a sand castle again. These sculptures are amazing.
From the Vancouver Sun World Championships of Sand Sculpture Competition & Exhibition.
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.
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 exercises 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.
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.
“what about her? Is the kingdom of heaven only a step from her also and will the passions of the earth at a single movement of her heart fall back and bow their heads as she passes?”
From The Visitor, in The Miner’s Pale Children by W.S. Merwin. It’s more like a short short story, whereas some of the pieces in the book read like dreams, like In a Dark Square, which ends this way:
He wonders what will happen if it starts to be day. The little lights, then, will still burn over the doors. They will grow yellow and fade as a new day brightens the lie numbers and he sees (for the first time, as he says) that each of the doors is crossed with colored ribbons, like a gift-wrapped package, complete with a huge bow and flowers. Then what? Are they really, all of them, presents sent from the old relatives whom he has never seen, the aunties, the grannies, the eyeless, the toothless, who have never seen him and yet presume to say what his whole life is to be? Will he finally (for the cold of the morning is terribly penetrating, after a night with no sleep, in the open) walk up the few steps, feeling a monument toppling inside him, and set his hand deliberately to the end of one of the ribbons, and undo the bow in the full knowledge that whatever that package contains will be his for the rest of his life?
“No,” he says, thinking of the day warming up sooner or later and everything starting to resume just where it left off. “No,” he says, “we have nothing to do with each other.”
And though no one is listening he repeats aloud to the darkness that he will continue to put all his faith in himself.
“Feeling a monument toppling inside him.” Oh, man.
Not all of the pieces work for me, some feel too forced — always the risk when prose sidles so close to the poetic. But the ones that do work are simply wrenching.
1. Select a source. Say, the National Weather Service.
2. Find the forecast for your region.
3. Read the text.
4. Plan for the exact opposite. If the text says, “90 percent chance of rain,” think “hooray! let’s go on a picnic!” If it says, “partially cloudy,” think “man the lifeboats.” If it says “thunderstorms likely,” go ahead, run outside to fly your metal kite, you’ll be perfectly fine.
(Can you tell I’m a bit disgusted with the accuracy of the predictions lately???)
Did you know that a ball with dimples will travel farther through the air than a ball with a smooth surface launched with the same amount of force?
Me either. But here’s an article the explains the physics.
And here I thought golf balls were made that way just because they look so darn sweet when they smile.
