Incoming freshman in the fall will receive new tools to help them through their college years. Other university reps attending the ACU information officer’s presentation at Apple headquarters in Cupertino include those from UCLA, Oxford, Princeton, MIT, Yale and Harvard.
Talk about a nifty welcoming packet.
Info via Briefing.com
There I was, looking for contact lens cleaner down at the drugstore, when over the speakers came this song. That was Thursday. It is still spinning around in my head two days later.
Someday, science will discover where earworms hang out, that part of the brain (large it must be) where these old, annoying but horribly catchy tunes reside. And they will aim miniscule probes of light and take them away from us forever.
Scientists discovered fairly recently that materials can be made that force light beams go around an object, thereby rendering the object invisible. In the next logical move, a team of researchers has found that such an ‘invisibility cloak’ can be applied to sound. The project of bending soundwaves is proceeding at the Polytechnic University in Spain.
I could have used such a cloak in the last few weeks when a family member developed the high-decibel cough of a current bug making the rounds. My headphones are not the noise-cancelling kind, and even when I went outside to the front yard, the cough could still be heard. Now I’ve learned that this could go on for a full six weeks.
Surely, almost everyone could use the technology at some point in their lives.
I dropped a big stack of cds the other day. They were in the multicolored jewel cases, several of which did not survive the fall. Which persuaded me that I need a different kind of storage.
This one has its merits, but I was thinking more along the lines of binders.
The list gets longer and longer. He died at 30 while swimming in Memphis. The Wikipedia entry details his classical influences (Bartok, Britten, Ravel) and contemporary (Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Edith Piaf, Judy Garland, Van Morrison, Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen, Elton John, Bob Dylan, among many others).
Near the time of his death, he confided to his girlfriend that he thought his mood swings were caused by bipolar disorder.
Here he sings Hallelejah, written by Cohen.
My Blueberry Nights with Jude Law as her leading man, Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love) directing. She does not sing in the film, but has a song on the soundtrack.
I’ve long admired the writings of Reynolds Price. If you grew up in the deep South, you would recognize a certain courtly cadence to the speech patterns that he captures like no other contemporary writer, and he gets in a whole lot else besides.
He had some medical problems a while back, and I did a search to help me recall what they were. In the process, I found that he co-authored Copperline with James Taylor.
Yes, that does account for the unique nature of the lyrics, and why they run deeper than the average Taylor song.
Lately, I’ve been catching up with episodes of the long-running British series, ‘Monarch of the Glen’, set in Scotland. (I alternate that with the latest DVD of MI-5, aka Spooks, another animal entirely.) Sometimes I struggle to keep up with the thick accents of some cast members. Today, I woke up with Groundskeeper Willie’s rantings in my head.
Nothing specific since I don’t recall many of his quotes, but there’s this vague gibberish in a Scottish burr in the background as I work. It should be annoying, but it’s very funny.
