Hammer & Jack

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  • Mad Men & The Beatles

    Readers who legitimately do not give a shit about Mad Men may still be interested in my comments on the Beatles album Revolver after the embedded YouTube video. I have no interest whatsoever to blog seasons of television or do recaps or anything that needs to be timely or consistent, but I do want to say that…

  • Losing Touch With The Young Folk

    I was pretty gobsmacked by this story out of Portland, Maine*: Over the next two weeks, Portland’s school district will install filtering software on laptops issued to high school students, in order to block access to pornography, social networking sites and video streaming sites when the laptops are at home. Access to those sites is…

  • The Agony and the Ecstacy of Web Logs

    I was poking around kottke.org and saw a post referencing the 10th anniversary of another blog, waxy.org. It’s a very high quality blog, and I had a great time poking through the archives. What’s been sticking with me, though, are some of the thoughts in the birthday post arguing for a personal vision and less…

  • beautiful explanations

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VhzlcSuT0] Leonard Bernstein delivering his Norton Lecture at Harvard University using Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-flat Major as an example. The lectures are available from your public library in a DVD set called The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard by Leonard Bernstein. I pretty much killed myself the night before last, staying…

  • MOTB breaks down the song “Outfit” by Drive-By Truckers

  • a note of despair

    1. glee rex omnis [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tt2u-S7NTs&feature=related] In the category of computer-aided statistics micronews*, the Official Charts Company (which sounds like a fake name) has stated that the Glee cast has broken Elvis Presley’s record for fastest act to score 20 top 40 hits. That particular “record” may or may not mean anything to you, but it’s…