Scenes from the Tilburg ZXZW festival last month, where the Arkestra held residency for master classes, where Marshall Allen was award an honourary diploma and where, of course, space sounds abounded:

Those in the mood for more space-fire magic can catch the Arkestra in Toronto October 21, 2008 when they open the X AVANT "Space is the Place" Festival

This is your brain on TeledyN:

[ Wordle - blog.teledyn.com ]

Some pre-electional pondering on the general of subject of what exactly happens when we dare let ourselves think we are 'us' and they are 'them' and whatever it is that happens to them isn't much of a concern to us. What happens is Nature nurtures its own, one of whom, an old arch-enemy of ours, is happily seizing this present grand chance of a millenia to quietly regroup its genetics and take another run at us, and us, "the smart ones", well we're more than happy to give it a whole third-world of a playground to hone its reaper blade.

What the heck am I talking about? Only this small drop in the blogspace posted by Daev on the topic of what TED-Prize winner James Nachtwey wanted most of all:

he was granted a wish - a wish to change the world.

Nachtwey decided to enlist the blogosphere to breaking a big story today, October 3rd, using his powerful photographs to share a vital story that the world needs to know about. The video was created to tell the story of extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) and to inspire us all to spread the story
[ Zeitgeist: James Nachtwey: Spread the story, stop the disease ]

So here you go, James, wish granted by one more little drop  read more »

Makes perfect sense to me. Instead of standing in Portugal watching beach wavelets to find an Italian restaurant in NYC expensed to a healthy NSA grant, why not simply wait? You don't even need a grant, not really, a cafe-press mugs&T-shirts page would do, and if 'they' have such advance intelligence as to travel interplanetarily, surely they wouldn't mind picking up the tab for breaking the ice with a short stop in to say 'boo'. Says Universe Today:  read more »

Tom Whitwell on the future of the music biz, a future that is remarkably slanted to what I'd been describing a few years back with my one-track universe, a future where pop-stars work hard for modest money, where the relationship star-to-fan is more than airplay and DRM-locks, where trading tracks are free-exchange tokens of tribal membership, and a future where record companies have a few essential clues about how the global social-networking post-boomer, post-massmarket world really works:

I've bought plenty of Grace Jones records with money. I'd happily pay more money to see her play a concert. Did anyone from her label email me to say she was playing in London on a Thursday night when I was at home watching Bonekickers? No. They took my money and didn't even get my name.  read more »

Submitted by mrG on Wed, 2008-09-24 13:43.

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What will the LHC find as it ramps up the terra-joules? Nothing useful, says the Wallace Thornhill of Thunderbolts.info, nothing that wasn't already well-known for a sliver the cost by those outside the group-think grip of the new 'God' Delusion:

"it is the search for the "God Particle" to explain gravity that reveals the irrationality of the enterprise. The equation of gravity with 'God' comes from the belief that gravity controls the universe. It is no more than that -- a belief."
[ The $6 billion LHC Circus ]  read more »

Keep the mind nimble, they say, learn a new skill, play an instrument ... and I might have said the same before reading this latest bit of neuroscience out of the University of Hamburg. I've often prescribed musicianship as a brain tonic, knowing but maybe neglecting to articulate how simply playing that instrument (be it french horns or juggling balls) is not really the whole story.  read more »

Ottawa columnist and jazz blogger Peter Hum riffs on my theme of Nine Seminal Moments In Canadian Jazz to produce a wonderfully illustrated history of how the music spread up and through the Great White North, from gin-joints to dance halls to art schools to beyond space and, who knows, maybe even Time itself:

someone with some deep thoughts and I was there cred very generously obliged. Below is one version of how Canadian jazz developed and what it sounded or sounds like, courtesy of reader/ former broadcaster Gary Lawrence Murphy, who by the way blogs here and lives somewhere I've never been  read more »

Submitted by mrG on Fri, 2008-09-12 22:15.

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