I went to a screening of rare Orson Welles reels today by Stefan Drößler of the Munich Film Museum called "Unknown Orson Welles," which turned out to be fascinating. Welles, of course, loved new mediums: he started out in theater and radio, moved to the movies, and finally tried his hand at television. Unfortunately, most of his television programs ( Read more... )

1. Does a gigantic ghostliness come over your soul at the mention of the White Mountains of New Hampshire?

2. Is your thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess?

Y'all might be interested to know that the 1970's radio drama of Dorothy L. Sayers's The Man Born to be King is being broadcast by the BBC.

Via Matt Yglesias, news on Obama's first appointees:
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Like every other paid-up coastal elitist, I've been reading up on the fascinating subject of Palinology.

The go-to place on the web for discussion of Palin's regional accent seems to be Mr. Verb, where the comment thread turns up gems like this one from James Crippen, a linguistics student (and Tlingit!) from the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. ( Read more... )

That is all.

I just wanted to pop in here toss out a recommendation for everyone who's interested in pre-election polling. This website by Nate Silver (yes, the well-known sabermetrician) is way more fascinating than polling aggregators like RCP or E-V. Its estimates are based on time-adjusted polling data combined with a regression (based on various ( Read more... )

All the tracks on Glenn Gould's recording of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas are marked with a "Parental Advisory Explicit Content."

Which, I guess, is somewhat defensible.

Okay, so about three weeks ago I had a massive hard disk crash. The drive was too physically damaged to recover the data, but I had backups of the important stuff. (Though it turns out I left my iPod connector cable at home, so my mp3s are still unavailable.) I had to reinstall everything, which was a pain, but man is born to trouble as the sparks ( Read more... )

Apparently BBC World has seen fit to replace their old countdown theme-the one that sounded like an apocalyptic rave-with a new remix in January of this year. It was bad enough when they replaced the " ribbon around the world" ident with the " BBC transmits its news through red death rays that break the laws of physics" montage.

Is nothing sacred