If You Find The Earth Boring...

Brother From Another Planet

The name of this blog is inspired by Sun Ra.  Check out this great documentary from BBC4 all about the brother from another planet.  Dig! [youtube LqZHzpAYVIk 675 530]

FFFFOUND!

One of my favorite blogs, the image repository FFFFOUND!, is a place where people post photos, artwork, graphic design projects, and reality-questioning visual illusions.  Check this one out often as it’s constantly changing to mind-boggling effect.

Booking Bands

I used to work in a record store where, in the community bathroom, there was a poster board with a list of band names merged with book titles, other band names, corporations and business names, etc. Looks like someone else had the same idea to extensively collect a list of merged band names and book titles in their work bathroom.  Then it got turned into a contest outside of work.  Check it out here.

Sonic Archeology

The original way to record and playback sounds were “records” – as they were called back then – wax cylinders.  These tubes of wax could be etched with a sound recording and then be played back repeatedly.  Their use was from the late 1880’s until they were stopped from production in 1929.  The introduction of the phonograph record in the 1910’s did away with wax cylinders. The Department of Special Collections at The University of California - Santa Barbara has established a digital archive of cylinder recordings – The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.  These audio recordings, which number more than 36,000 digital files, can be downloaded or streamed online. On Tuesday nights, WFMU broadcasts the Antique Phonograph Music Program and you can hear a special mix of Antique Phonograph recordings from The Wire magazine.

Public Service Announcement

I know it’s been a while since you’ve heard anything substantial from me, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy with this blog.  After a server failure erased everything, I was able to restore from a backup, but I had to resort to plenty of script writing to bring the dead databases back to life.  I have tried to fix any posts that may have been lost since I backed everything up.  You’ll notice that I’ve lost my photos page, which should be back up soon and totally re-vamped from scratch.  All this has happened while I’ve been traveling, so that’s added to the amount of time it’s taken me to get back on track.  I would like to thank you, my faithful readers, for your patience through this quiet time.