Now this is simply bizarre, or it used to was anyhow

Amanda Palmer seems to me supremely worth following, and her blog is about as close as one can get to doing that. She's a diarist in her songwriting, as one reviewer has noted, and that's a good thing. Not that I necessarily grok everything, but the openness of her creativity is quite inspiring, and her song lyrics are often just plain brilliant distillations of whatever they're trying to distill.

we sometimes think of walking tours in Devon, and this might encourage thought into planning

very nice new Beta

fascinating graph, though what it mostly shows ME is how utterly peripheral my own musical interests are, not that I'm surprised… but perhaps "world-wide music scene" is a bit of an exaggeration

not actually very useful, but at least National Geographic is paying some attention

offered as a Story, via Bruce Sterling

"Mother and Her Sisters: 1912"

something sinful this way comes

talking of Labors of Love…

Has anybody said it better?

Couldn’t our “news” channels give us some background, interviews, etc., about these key developents? It is almost as if the “news” corporations are trying to keep us away from real news by giving us fluff and narrow shouting matches. It is almost as if they think it is better if the public of the world’s most powerful country were not very well informed about US policy, labor protest movements abroad, and the dynamics of politics in US allies…

a very nice presentation of aesthetic and technical material, awakening demons I first encountered about 50 years ago…

what a gem, and what I nearly missed

Kate Nepveu’s re-read commentary is almost complete, almost two years after she began it. Me, I first read LOTR in 1955, and I've been through it several times since then (though I tend to skip over what seem to me the boring bits). Time spent on this site is, I think, much better invested than time spent on watching the films. All those orcs… and as somebody said…