Saturday, May 16, 2009

Compare/Contrast

Found this an intriguing comparison, as each of the four vocalists produces such a unique sound. Peter's and Trent's voices are so distinct, making the collaborative version rich and interesting. But it's almost too much, as TV's vocals complement one another so well as a sufficiently groovy duo. Reminds me of a Mahler piece performed by a several-hundred-piece orchestra; the movement's tonality is incredibly complex and thus wondrous, but there's something equally spectacular about a seemingly simple violin solo. Perhaps there is no comparison to be made, just an appreciation for the individual performances...

The always cool TV On The Radio performing their tune "Dreams", infused w/ some Bauhaus and NIN flavor.



And here's "Dreams" straight up. (Sound's a bit distorted, though.)

Friday, May 15, 2009

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Monday, May 11, 2009

"The answers are simple."

Today's Daily Ray of Hope from the Sierra Club is worth sharing.

"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."
~ Dr. Seuss


Photo Credit: Jim Dollar
Location: Otter Point in Acadia National Park in Maine

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Awesome animals

This slideshow is full of neat animals in the news. I'm such a sucker for stories about critters - happy or sad. The latter, of course, inevitably make me angry at my own species.

Here's a great one:
In November, the cries of alarm from Willie, a Quaker parrot from Denver, Colo., alerted his owner, Megan Howard, that the toddler she was babysitting was choking. His yells of "Mama, baby" led Howard to perform the Heimlich maneuver and earned Willie the local Red Cross chapter's Animal Lifesaver Award on March 20.
Some others include a turtle fossil, 30-something millions of years old, found to have an intact egg sac (a first here the U.S.); hundreds of stray dogs starving and turning to cannibalism because locals dropped them on an uninhabitable island to get them out of their fishing village; a 772-pound stingray is the largest freshwater fish caught by a rod and reel (they released it, thankfully); and an albino elephant baby born in the wild in Africa (aww!).

Honey, is that you?

LemonDrop.com (Who thinks up these names? And, just in case you're wondering how I even found the site, this was a headline on my homepage) reports on identical twins marrying identical twins in China. It's like a bad sitcom waiting to happen, but sorta cute, too.


Identical twins marrying a set of identical twins -- it sounds like something from a soap opera. But it actually happened in Wuxi, China, so we can only hope that none of them are evil and/or homicidal.

It was unusual enough when Jian Yang, one-half of a set of identical male twins, proposed to Juxiang Jiang, herself one-half of a matching set. But things got weirder when their identical siblings, Kang Yang and Lanxiang Zhang, fell in love at their engagement party. All this led to -- clearly -- a double wedding.

Of course, hilarity and confusion ensued. For instance, Kang once tried to hold his brother Jian's fiancee's hand on a group outing. Naturally, she didn't stop him, because she thought Kang was Jian. And there they stood, until Kang's fiancee helpfully corrected the error. (How did she know?)

Their parents consider the marriages a sign of great luck. Which is good, because with all the potential for accidentally adultery, they're going to need all the luck they can get. That, and name tags.

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