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It’s tempting, in telling the story of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” For the residence in question is made predominantly of glass, or rather glass and steel, and its first owner turned out to have more than a few stones for its […]
Some YouTuber posted online a pretty nice clip of an espresso shot being pulled from a La Marzocco FB80 espresso machine at 120 frames per second. They recommend muting the sound, then putting on your own music. I gave it a quick shot with the famous soundtrack for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I’ll […]
Frank Zappa called them the “Mothers of Prevention,” the group of wives married to members of Congress who decided in the mid-80s to go to war against rock lyrics and whip up some good ol’ conservative hysteria. We’ve talked about this time before on this site, especially as Zappa himself testified in front of Congress […]
Fifty years ago this month, Lou Reed nearly destroyed his own career with one double album. Metal Machine Music sold 100,000 copies during the three weeks of summer 1975 between its release and its removal from the market. More than a few of the many buyers who promptly returned it would have been expecting something […]
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Is it okay to dress your cat in a ridiculous costume? What about giving a poodle a haircut that subjects him to ridicule? The cat and the dog probably don’t know or care, but we think less of their person if it happens. At Disney, the costumed characters need security guards. Kids (and more often) […]
It’s tempting, in telling the story of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” For the residence in question is made predominantly of glass, or rather glass and steel, and its first owner turned out to have more than a few stones for its […]
It’s easy to imagine that we should do our work and then, when it doesn’t work as we hope, improvise to fix it. But perhaps our work is to show up ready and willing to deal with a future we didn’t expect. I keep writing about it because we all need to keep thinking about […]
A useful metaphor from juggling: When you find yourself lunging for a ball or club, let it drop. Lunging will always lead to a drop sooner or later, and it pays to skip the lunge and simply begin again, on better terms.
