It's Record Store Day!

I want my Music Telephonovision

A Liberal's Libretto has posted a link to a Library of Congress lecture by Mark Schubin, the Met's HD Über-Geek, about opera as engine for technological innovation. Okay, that sounds kind of dry in description, but in execution it's actually quite awesome. The lecture is about an hour of opera-lover's steampunk holiday, followed by a Q&A which is mostly about the technical ins and outs of HDcasting the Met, which, inquiring minds...

res retro

So, by the time the crunching begins, how many generations of tablet and smartphone will have been used argue about, design, and build the thing? And will the Lego version get there first?

While we wait, there exists a relevant chronicle of crime-fighting escapades, wherein, among other things, Charles Wheatstone* is revealed to have been an evil criminal mastermind. And there's loads of footnotes. And monkeys. And Isambard Kingdom Brunel.


*Inventor of the concertina, which should have been the giveaway.

In the Mirror

Der Spiegel has a fairly cranky article (in German only, it appears) about Celebration, Disney's "planned community" of the 1990's -- an article made crankier by a linked photo album of scenes from present-day Fordlandia, and another from a 19th century Gold Rush ghost town. I sense a cranky theme. Not that I'm not inclined to agree with the implications, of course, but I think it's funny that they're so keen to rain on our utopian parade.

On the other hand, Fordlandia is looking a whole lot better than Detroit these days. Fire literary references to the vanity of human enterprise at will.