The oldest electronic drum machine
Here she blows:
Man, I love suff with cogs and pulleys and gears and stuff. It’s so fascinating watching little mechanical things moving sinusoidally. I used to be fascinated by street organs as a kid (and actually, I still would be if they ever existed on the street still). That’s why this is cool. It might be more efficient to pipe everything through CPUs and ICs and ETCs, but it isn’t as pleasing to the eye. I think we need to start incorporating analogue wheel and pulleys and stuff into digital electronics.
Or at least have a few pistons around the house. Doing their thing. With steam.
Please don’t turn off your cellphone
Ordinarily, cellphones get shut-up before a performance, but not here:
And here’s the making of:
(via Gizmodo)
Suck juice from moose
When I was about 8 years old my dad bought me a copy of Carmina Burana on cassette tape (remember them?). It turns out I didn’t really like anything except for O Fortuna!, that staple of medieval action movie trailers. I do remember being excited by the tightly compressed liner notes, which included both the Latin and English translation of the poems. “Velut Luna” has been what I’ve heard when it plays ever since.
It might have been different if I had seen these lyrics first, instead:
Lake effect
Taken while on a three o’ clock saunter around the lake:
And taken on my usually rubbish phone camera! Apparently even its paltry pixel count can’t put up a fight when faced with such a delicious increase in daily maximum temperature, and blueness of sky.
The End of Summer
Here’s another young musician to bracket the weekend, with an accordion-based rendition of the end of “Summer”, from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons:
The end of summer. How appropriate. It snowed here last Friday. Snowed! I can’t believe it’s already time to start worrying about alternate side-of-the-road parking.