Priorities

The sheer magnitude of the loss of the cultural artifacts and antiquities during the looting of museums in Iraq is close to incomprehensible.

The fact that more attention was paid to saving oil wells than to saving items comprising a large part of the earliest history of western culture is equally unforgivable.

A rather in-depth review of what has just happened, along with analysis and thoughts for the future, plus a look back at some earlier “liberations” of Iraqi antiques, is available at Francis Deblauwe’s web site.

From Tom comes word of yet another example of the limitless creativity and cleverness which serve as hallmarks of the human race.

To be honest, I’m not 100 percent convinced this isn’t a hoax; vinyl record sound production via a scanner and a custom program? With no turntable and no needle?

You be the judge.

LSD was discovered by Dr. Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist. He was an apparently somewhat accident prone person, as he both created LSD by virtue of a mistake in the lab, and also, later that same day, accidently ingested some of his new creation. He realized what had happened as he was riding his bicycle home from work that day (many fans of LSD call this day “bicycle day”). A few days later he took a controlled dosage, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green,
Towering over your head.
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes,
And she’s gone.

The Beatles, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

In the midwest in the late 50’s and early 60’s Johnny Cash was one of the musical staples on the radio and in honky-tonk jukeboxes. Though he had not been in my regular listening rotation for years, that changed recently.

He put out a couple of great albums in recent years: American III: Solitary Man and American IV: The Man Comes Around. On these albums he covers all manner of popular songs from the past 20 years or so. Of course, some of the songs work better than others, depending on his reading and/or the listener’s taste. Some songs, such as Tom Petty’s Won’t Back Down, sound like they were written by and for the Man in Black; it’s hard to imagine it as Tom’s song any more!

One song, Hurt, written by Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor, has become a surprise hit. It’s a very powerful, moving, dark reading of the song, and is greatly enhanced by an accompanying video, which contrasts the 70 year old Cash with old video footage of him during all phases of his career. Highly Recommended!

According to this Rolling Stone article, Cash’s producer, Rick Rubin, sent a copy of the video to NIN’s Trent Reznor. “We were in the studio, getting ready to work — and I popped it in,” Reznor says. “By the end I was really on the verge of tears. I’m working with Zach de la Rocha, and I told him to take a look. At the end of it, there was just dead silence. There was, like, this moist clearing of our throats and then, ‘Uh, OK, let’s get some coffee.’”

The video is available in both Real and WMF formats, as well as in Quicktime.