keeping up on my japanese

Wagashi: Kyoto Sanjo Wakasaya Gion Chigo Mochi (三条若狭屋 祇園ちご餅)



Gion Chigo Mochi covered in sparkly ice-like flakes, filled with sweet and salty miso has been a Kyoto favorite for about 100 years!
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via paris breakfasts:








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via traveling food lady:





Maybe it's just me, but I swear the displays of gelato seem to grow larger and larger each time I visit Italy. The creations and new flavors are endless! I would never think to throw in a few coconut shells or melon slices to show off these mountains of creamy masterpieces . So many times I would see the attendant scoop into the gelato and I would hesitate to look for fear they would destroy this piece of edible art before I was able to get my shots.(pictures) Never fear. A few pats, quick movements with the hand and the mountain appeared again, just as lovely. Down the road, on the other side of the street were two more gelato stands. Then more and more!
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via badgods: famous poems rewritten as limericks

The Raven

There once was a girl named Lenore
And a bird and a bust and a door
And a guy with depression
And a whole lot of questions
And the bird always says "Nevermore."

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

There was an old father of Dylan
Who was seriously, mortally illin'
"I want," Dylan said
"You to bitch till you're dead.
"I'll be cheesed if you kick it while chillin'."
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via today on the interwebs:


[via]
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via our adventures in japan:

After "lunch", I went back into the rain and jumped onto the train and headed for Roppongi to check out Tokyo Midtown. This is a new office complex with lots of eateries and cafes. I wanted to see Belberry, a Belgian confiture (jams & jelly) maker. I was about to buy some marmalade when this caught my eye...purple fig chocolate...I immediately picked this up. Can't wait to try it on baguette and ice cream.


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via nyt:

State of the Art - BlackBerry Aims to Stay Step Ahead

Boy, oh boy. The bunch who brought you the BlackBerry sure has been a band of busy beavers.

Ted Stevens Receives a Hero’s Welcome in Alaska

“If I had had a fair trial in Alaska, I would have been acquitted,” he said to cheers. He added: “By providing for an appeals process, our founding fathers knew that mistakes could be made and innocent men could be wrongly convicted. This is one of those times.”
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esau mwamawaya + radioclit - the very best mixtape

...the collaboration between the East African singer and the British, Mad Decent-affiliated producers is one of the most interesting and entertaining records you’ll hear all year. Done in Piracy Funds Terrorism style, Radioclit pairs Mwamwaya’s vocals to variety of samples ranging from M.I.A.’s “Boyz,” to Hans Zimmer’s True Romance theme, from Vampire Weekend’s “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” to Cannibal Ox’s “Life’s Ill.” The effect is the rare zeitgeisty type record as fun to listen to as think about. Highly recommended for anyone into afro-beat, hip-hop, radios, or clits. /passion of the weiss


devendra banhart - cripple crow


vetiver - to find me gone

vetiver and devendra banhart have a nack for writing songs that construe settings of all four seasons no matter where the sun or moon are in the sky. their songwriting is very earthbound in the broadest sense of the word. it's not earthy, per se, but if it were part of a kite, it'd be the sail that's tethered to the ground by a lil string. for my musical money, nothing perfects watching a heavy snowfall from indoors like the wintry sounds of these bearded chaps. vetiver's "to find me gone" is more wintry than their eponymous album (and with less latin flare/trucker vibe than 2008's "thing of the past"), and "cripple crow" features devendra's "long haired child," "mama wolf," and "korean dogwood:" a trifecta particularly apropos of the changing seasons as we tilt away from the sun.
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air - talkie walkie / pocket symphony

air is weirdly and aesthetically french and japenese. not even respectively. just all in one. talkie walkie continues to reign supreme as my favorite album of theirs (with 10,000hz probably ranking last). in any event, french and japanese culture are ostensibly unrelated in most respects. but conceptually, they're both rooted in fundamental originality and reinventing old concepts in their own niches of creativity and insight relative to style, fashion, food, art, etc. japanese aesthetics pay homage to nature, clean lines, and minimalism in their more refined modes, and crass commercialism, blinding and/or seizure-inducing flashing lights, and postmodern freakiness manifested in literally (probably) everything that could possibly appeal to any human sense, olfactory or otherwise. french is more of a lascivious affair, primarily jogging the more visceral and tangible senses. french art, including food, painting, sculpture, poetry and prose, clothing, wine, and a vast multitude of other humanitarian endeavors are all represented to their fullest within the broad confines of joie de vivre. not to mention, french women are some of the most coveted sexual figures in the world, and japanese pornography is home to some of the most utterly bizarre pornography in the world. it's as though the two societies were propagated by, and are still magnets for, people who essentially never grew out of that childhood phase where the world was still viewed as a place where any imaginary proposal seemed completely legit, no matter how far fetched. these kids simply happened to have grown up building their lives around the omphalos of play and possibility, as opposed to the straightlaced dutch and swiss or the power-hungry china and north korea. air is a cool band, and when i eventually get to france and japan, those two dudes will be playlisted.

true miscellany

"the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
don't go back to sleep.
you must ask for what you really want.
don't go back to sleep.
people are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
the door is round and open.
don't go back to sleep." /rumi
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On 4 November 1995 Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a radical right-wing Orthodox Jew who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords and believed he was saving the country from a dire fate. The shooting took place in the evening as Rabin was leaving a mass rally in Tel Aviv in support of the Oslo process. Before leaving the stage on the night of the assassination, Rabin had been singing Shir LaShalom (literally Song for Peace), along with Israeli singer Miri Aloni. After he died, a sheet of paper with the lyrics was found in his pocket, stained with blood.

related:

the contents of martin luther king jr.'s briefcase at the time of his assassination, including a book entitled, "strength to love."











In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black -- considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible -- you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization -- black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love. /bobby kennedy, response to mlk jr.'s assassination, april 4, 1968



bobby kennedy was assassinated june 5, 1968: 63 days after mlkjr's death, and forty years + five months antecendent to obama's election as president. apparently it's taken our country this long to rid itself of a warmongering generation of old white men.
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obama's infomercial:

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notable gastronomy of late:

lakefront brewery's annual pumpkin lager and mimollette


for sale september - november. it is quite delicious, and i'm not even a beer fan.


tastea: passionberry


chocolate chip and gingersnap, i believe. this may become acceptable currency in my household.

rhyming weird insults

"the more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself." /molière


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Barack Obama To Appear On "The Daily Show" Wednesday [via huffington post]

This will be Obama's fourth time on the show. He last appeared on April 21, the eve of the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania.
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Phony flier says Virginians vote on different days [via hamptonroads]

The somewhat official-looking flier - it features the state board logo and the state seal - is dated Oct. 24 and indicates that "an emergency session of the General Assembly has adopted the follwing (sic) emergency regulations to ease the load on local electorial (sic) precincts and ensure a fair electorial process."

The four-paragraph flier concludes with: "We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause but felt this was the only way to ensure fairness to the complete electorial process."
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mccain vs. obama dance-off: this is an impressively well-edited video. the drama and suspense are the sugarplums on this cake. [via]

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The Mysterious Cough, Caught on Film [via]

The process involves a small, bright light source, precisely placed lenses, a curved mirror, a razor blade that blocks part of the light beam and other tools that make it possible to see and photograph disturbances in the air. In the world of gas dynamics, a cough is merely “a turbulent jet of air with density changes.” Though coughs spread tuberculosis, SARS, influenza and other diseases, surprisingly little is known about them. “We don’t have a good understanding of the air flow,” Dr. Settles said.




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beautiful decay profiles marsha pels.




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via ny times:

Frequent Flier - Tired and Impatient? Keep Your Pants On

I do try and roll with whatever comes my way. But sometimes my brain morphs into mush from all the travel.

Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning Project

Under the settlement, which is subject to court approval, the money will be used to set up a book registry, resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and cover legal fees. Copyright holders will also be able to register their works and receive payment for book sales and use by individuals and for subscriptions by libraries. Revenue from those programs will be split between Google, the publishers and the authors. If approved, the settlement could expand online access to millions of in-copyright books available at libraries participating in Google’s Book Search program. The settlement left unresolved the question of whether Google’s unauthorized scanning of copyrighted books was permissible under copyright law.

Bracing for Bad Times, Operas and Orchestras Batten Down the Hatches

In addition to canceling “Pagliacci” next spring, the company is letting three employees go, giving up on a big Wagner production next year in favor of the less financially taxing “Don Giovanni” and doing without the final performance in an April run of Donizetti’s “Elixir of Love.” That performance had been scheduled to take place at the same time as a Final Four game of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, at nearby Ford Field. Management thinks it can make more money renting out its parking lot to fans.

“It hurts a lot,” said Tom O’Connor, the executive director of the Orchestras of Pasadena, which includes the symphony and the pops. “But I’ve been in the business almost 40 years. You just have to think imaginatively: how can we make sure music is always available to people in one form or another?”

A Rise in Kidney Stones Is Seen in U.S. Children

Forty to 65 percent of kidney stones are formed when oxalate, a byproduct of certain foods, binds to calcium in the urine. (Other common types include calcium phosphate stones and uric acid stones.) And the two biggest risk factors for this binding process are not drinking enough fluids and eating too much salt; both increase the amount of calcium and oxalate in the urine.

Excess salt has to be excreted through the kidneys, but salt binds to calcium on its way out, creating a greater concentration of calcium in the urine and the kidneys.

“What we’ve really seen is an increase in the salt load in children’s diet,” said Dr. Bruce L. Slaughenhoupt, co-director of pediatric urology and of the pediatric kidney stone clinic at the University of Wisconsin. He and other experts mentioned not just salty chips and French fries, but also processed foods like sandwich meats; canned soups; packaged meals; and even sports drinks like Gatorade, which are so popular among schoolchildren they are now sold in child-friendly juice boxes.

Crossword Puzzles - Wordplay Blog

Welcome, finally, to Wordplay, the newest blog at The New York Times. For those who don’t know me, I used to run an independent Web site called The JimH Crossword Blog. My strategy there was to let each puzzle suggest a theme for discussion, so topics ranged from crossword analysis and philosophy to solving strategies, from the serious to the ridiculous.
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via largeheartedboy:

The Line of Best Fit interviews Fred Nicolaus of Department of Eagles.

Do you read your own reviews? Do you generally read music magazines / websites etc (and if so, which?)

When it comes to reading about music in general, I do it a lot. I read Pitchfork, which I think is pretty much the paper of record when it comes to contemporary music, also some blogs, especially Gorilla Vs Bear, that guy is usually right about what’s interesting and what’s not. I read the music section of the New York Times, Spin, whatever. It’s all interesting on some level. I do sometimes read our reviews, I think you’re either a saint or a liar if you say you don’t, but it can get depressing pretty fast. I try to limit it.

The New York Observer interviews the "high priestess of Scandanavian pop," Lykke Li.

O2: There're a lot of different genres running through your record. There's hip-hop, there's pop, there's a little folk. Is there a single element that connects all of these songs for you, whether musically or thematically?

LL: It's me. I don't know why I should have to stick to one sound when I love all kinds of music. The thing [that pulls the album together] is my voice, and what I say, and honesty. And then I can go and do a techno song or a blues song. I don't want to define it or narrow it down 'cause I think it's really boring to label music. And I certainly don't want to get labeled either--I'm scared of that.
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a sampling of the results from a calvin and hobbes keyword search for "universe:"

reason without wisdom/pleasure without happiness

October 13, 1912: Three and a half years after he left office, Roosevelt was running for President as a member of the Progressive Party. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, John F. Schrank, a saloon-keeper from New York, shot Roosevelt once with a revolver. A 100-page speech folded over twice and the metal glasses case in Roosevelt's breast pocket slowed the bullet. Amidst the commotion, Roosevelt yelled out "Quiet! I've been shot." Roosevelt insisted on giving his speech with the bullet still lodged inside him. He later went to the hospital, but the bullet was never removed. Roosevelt, remembering that William McKinley died after operations to remove his bullet, chose to have his remain. Schrank said that McKinley's ghost had told him to avenge his assassination. Schrank was found legally insane and was institutionalized until his death in 1943.
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via nytimes:

Theodore Roosevelt on the 2008 Presidential Campaign

Q. Should we condone the huge severance packages paid to executives of rescued corporations?

A. There is need in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places cannot be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have ample recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration will come only from those who are mean of soul.

Author Michael Pollan, whose best-selling books have prompted readers to think differently about food, is now asking the next president to rethink the nation’s food policies.

Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them.

related:
WNYC - The Leonard Lopate Show: Michael Pollan on the Future of American Food Policy (October 22, 2008)
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A French Family Dynasty Reinvents the Oyster

Unlike many other companies, Gillardeau buys seedling oysters that are one to two years old. That way it avoided most of the impact of the widespread death of younger French seedling oysters this year, believed to have been caused by a warm winter, heavy spring rains and possibly excess runoff of fertilizer and pesticides from local vegetable farms...Before a batch is packed, one Gillardeau or another makes sure to taste a few oysters. Theirs are less briny than many others’ — nuttier, fleshier and almost sweet.
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from my way news:

Apple Inc. comes out against gay marriage ban

The Cupertino-based computer and iPod maker posted a notice on its Web site Friday pledging $100,000 to defeat Proposition 8. The statement says Apple views Prop. 8 as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue...An Apple spokesman declined to elaborate on the company's position.
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ted talks:

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied. [via]


Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most. [via]


Dean Ornish talks about simple, low-tech and low-cost ways to take advantage of the body's natural desire to heal itself. [via]


MOMA design curator Paola Antonelli previews the groundbreaking show "Design and the Elastic Mind" -- full of products and designs that reflect the way we think now. [via]


Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about what we can learn from American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. Then she shares a moving memory of her own father, and of their shared love of baseball. [via]


EXTRA SUPER SPECIAL: the following is in the top five ted videos i've watched.

Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument." The Net's most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel" to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code.



(related:

The Pirate’s Dilemma tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works. It offers understanding and insight for a time when piracy is just another business model, the remix is our most powerful marketing tool and anyone with a computer is capable of reaching more people than a multi-national corporation. (the book is $[in rainbows])


also somewhat related:
Larry Lessig comments on Barack Obama, and why he believes he will be a great president, and describes the importance of the architecture of participation as a necessary premise to make people part of the political action.
)
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The composer Antonio Vivaldi was master violin tutor at the Ospedale della Pieta from 1704, and chief composer from 1713 until he left Venice in 1740. Much of Vivaldi's music was written expressly for the women of the Ospedale. Some of the babies had been abandoned because of their physical deformities, and Vivaldi had instruments specially adapted for these women. The female orchestra and choir gave concerts to aristocratic audiences while hidden behind a metal grille. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one such listener, and describes the performance in his Confessions (1770):

"I have not an idea of anything so voluptuous and affecting as this music; the richness of the art, the exquisite taste of the vocal part, the excellence of the voices, the justness of the execution, everything in these delightful concerts concurs to produce an impression which certainly is not the mode, but from which I am of opinion no heart is secure."

He goes on to describe meeting the musicians.
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so said jean-jacques rousseau:

As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State "What does it matter to me?" the State may be given up for lost.

In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgement of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honour, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. /Second Treatise on Inequality
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deerhunter - microcastle/weird era continued (2008), the former is one of my favorites of the year thus far, the latter was just leaked
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horsefeathers - house with no name

Similar artists: Devendra Banhart, Loch Lomond, Band of Horses /radiobutt
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tobacco - fucked up friends (2008)

The subtle difference between Tobacco's day gig, Black Moth Super Rainbow, and this disc is the synthetic dusty beat, neck-snapping rhythms and vocals courtesy of Aesop Rock on "Dirt" (a heavenly union, I might add), pandering to hip-hoppers more than Flaming Lips fans - but, again, the discord is marginal. Otherwise, Tobacco drenches the tracks in his signature vocoded vocals/vintage analog synths/trash-pit drum machinery sound, a stylized niche resembling something between the cracks of Boards of Canada's Music Has a Right to and Geogaddi." /a guy on amazon
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the hood internet vs. tobacco vs. aesop rock (2008)

Tobacco (of Black Moth Super Rainbow) has a new album called Fucked Up Friends dropping on Anticon in two weeks. Aesop Rock is on the track “Dirt,” so not only does he appear on the Hood remix of said track, we’ve also made this whole mini-mixtape (technically a compilation since the songs don’t mix into each other) of Tobacco and Aesop with some other special guest appearances.

load universe into cannon. aim at brain. fire. /alan watts

old onion articles:

Activision Reports Sluggish Sales For Sousaphone Hero



Response to Sousaphone Hero on video-gaming message boards has been tepid at best. "That controller is like 100 pounds even though its [sic] only plastic," wrote mastagamer457, a moderator on one Sousaphone Hero message thread. "I think I screwed up my shoulder pretty bad.""I played the career mode for three hours and kept feeling like I was playing the same annoying circus tune over and over," kiLLlah_steVe of Columbus, OH wrote. "On one song, you're forced to play the same two notes back and forth for 96 measures."

Butterfly Fuck-Swing Filled With Junk Mail



"The wife and I sure had some crazy times on that thing before we had the baby," said Nathan Moscone, 37, motioning towards the adult toy, upon which he had just hung his suit jacket. "But it seems like forever since I turned her upside down in that thing and dripped hot wax onto her vulva. Maybe we can give it another go after we finish the deck. That's taking up all my spare time at the moment." The butterfly fuck-swing features nylon straps, padded stirrups, a swiveling hook, a crossbar Klein-Moscone used to grasp in the throes of ecstasy, and, more recently, several unread issues of O, The Oprah Magazine.
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from Collected Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

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from ny/nz:

When I’ve got time to kill in a bar or restaurant, I like looking around and trying to guess all the stories that are unfolding at the tables around me. The first dates and business dinners are easy enough to spot, as are the family get-togethers, the birthdays, and the anniversaries. The more intriguing stories are usually the quieter pairs, the ones sharing a drink in silence, barely making eye contact or eating mechanically and exchanging what appear to be desultory remarks about the side dishes and the promptness of the service. Are they old friends, happy to spend time in one another’s company, no longer bearing the burden of providing constant entertainment and fun? A long-established couple, communicating in the code of multi-year relationships, in which a seemingly throwaway comment about the crispness of the green beans carries with it layers upon layers of meaning about sacrifices, bad choices, and disappointments past?
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HearWhere is a search engine helping you find live music playing all over the world. With more than one million shows from over one million artists, HearWhere not only shows you who is playing nearby, but also plays the artists music, and links to the artists myspace page.

it lists 810 shows in madison this week alone.
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hushie is an mp3 search engine.
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jeff weiss' why obama essay on largehearted boy is one of the best in the series i've read thus far.

"Of course, any cursory analysis of American history shows that we shouldn’t want anything but the elite for our highest office. In fact, if our founding fathers were tried by today’s standards of the Republican Party, they’d probably be decried as mackerel-eating, New-England-Courant-reading, snuff-snorting nancy boys. After all, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson & Co. were polymaths in powdered wigs who worshipped French Enlightenment philosophers and devised the electoral college and a system of checks and balances precisely because they feared mob mentality. Hell, Americans didn’t even popularly elect senators until 1913. If anything, this country is built on a bedrock foundation of elitism, with some of our most lauded presidents (The Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, JFK) emerging from a Patrician class."

also from lhb:

The San Francisco Chronicle interviews Haruki Murakami.

Q: Readers are very passionate about your work. Why do you think fiction matters to people so much?

A: That's a big question. I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching. Sometimes it's not easy. You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue. You cannot do that while you are asleep. When the dream stops, it stops forever. You cannot continue to dream that same dream. But if you are a writer, you can do that. That is a great thing, to keep on dreaming while you are awake.
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With over 50,000 posters, the CSPG archive is the largest collection of Post World War II graphics in the United States.










we are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed. /thomas jefferson, (4/2/1790)






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Because of the fame of his children's books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist. But for two years, 1941-1943, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons.


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The first attempt to do bodily harm to a President was against Jackson. Jackson ordered the dismissal of Robert B. Randolph from the Navy for embezzlement. On May 6, 1833, Jackson sailed on USS Cygnet to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was to lay the cornerstone on a monument near the grave of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington's mother. During a stopover near Alexandria, Virginia, Randolph appeared and struck the President. He then fled the scene with several members of Jackson's party chasing him, including the well known writer Washington Irving. Jackson decided not to press charges.

On January 30, 1835, a more serious attack occurred in the Capitol. Jackson was crossing the Capitol Rotunda after the funeral of South Carolina Representative Warren R. Davis when Richard Lawrence approached Jackson. Lawrence aimed two pistols at Jackson, which both misfired. Jackson then attacked Lawrence with his cane, prompting his aides to restrain him. Others present, including David Crockett, restrained and disarmed Lawrence, who was clearly deranged.

Richard Lawrence gave the doctors several reasons for the shooting. He had recently lost his job painting houses and somehow blamed Jackson. He claimed that with the President dead, "money would be more plenty"—a reference to Jackson’s struggle with the Bank of the United States—and that he "could not rise until the President fell." Finally, he informed his interrogators that he was actually a deposed English King—Richard III, specifically, dead since 1485—and that Jackson was merely his clerk. He was deemed insane, institutionalized, and never punished for his assassination attempt.

Jackson's statue in the Rotunda is placed in front of the doorway in which the attempt occurred.
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some words brilliantly strung together by john adams:

A single assembly will never be a steady guardian of the laws, if Machiavel is right, when he says, Men are never good but through necessity: on the contrary, when good and evil are left to their choice, they will not fail to throw every thing into disorder and confusion. Hunger and poverty may make men industrious, but laws only can make them good; for, if men were so of themselves, there would be no occasion for laws; but, as the case is far otherwise, they are absolutely necessary. /Vol. I, letter XXVI Ch. 4 Opinions of Philosophers : Dr. Price

Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it. /Letter to his son, John Quincy Adams (13 November 1816)
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via nyt:

Classical Ghosts, Audible Once Again

...the cylinders contain the earliest existing recordings of works by Bach, Wagner, Verdi, Chopin, Schumann and others. The performers include several noted composer-pianists: Sergei Taneyev, a pupil of Tchaikovsky’s who played the premiere of his Second Concerto; Anton Arensky, playing his much-loved Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor just months after it was written; and Paul Pabst, a Liszt pupil and dedicatee of pieces by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. They also include the legendary pianist Josef Hofmann in his first known recordings and singers who performed in the premieres of operas by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Some 22 of the artists, well known in their day, have not been represented on recordings until now, including Taneyev.

With each cylinder able to record for only two to four minutes, the release will be limited to snippets: 90 of music and 4 with just spoken words. Those include Tolstoy reading from his work and what may be the voice and whistling of Tchaikovsky. The musical recordings in the release run from 1890 to 1923.

For Some in the Military, Danger Is Seen Off Duty

So many members of the armed forces have been dying on sport bikes like the Ninja that the Navy and Marines have made special training mandatory for sport bike riders this year. In one weekend in September, the Navy lost four men in sport bike accidents.

To Counter Problems of Food Aid, Try Spuds

Grains like wheat and rice have long been staples of diets in most of the world and the main currency of food aid. Now, a number of scientists, nutritionists and aid specialists are increasingly convinced that the potato should be playing a much larger role to ensure a steady supply of food in the developing world.

(closely related:


Contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and the author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan delivers this Avenali Lecture on the stories of four familiar plant species: the apple,the tulip, the potato, and cannabis.)

Stir-fried Shrimp With Chestnuts



Like figs, lemons and apples, chestnuts are free for the picking in many areas where they grow. Those areas used to include much of the United States, until a blight wiped out almost all the trees over a few decades. Though chestnuts make their appearance here each fall, they are imported, mostly from Europe and China.

A California Ballot Measure Offers Rights for Farm Animals

“This is a well-intended initiative for animals with some very negative unintended consequences for people,” said Julie Buckner, a spokeswoman for Californians for Safe Food, the leading anti-Proposition 2 group. “It’s going to wipe out the California egg farmers, and it’s going to raise the food costs for consumers. And this is at a time when our economy is hurting.”