December 22, 2007 – 9:22 pm
Following a link from Bill Vallicella, I’ve just read a review of the movie Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, in which the reviewer, the historian Ronald Radosh — who knew Seeger personally, and admires him as an artist and a man of peace, generally — nonetheless calls attention to the unrepentance of those of the American Left, including a great many beloved folk musicians, who strove on behalf of the Communist Party for much of the 20th century.
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December 21, 2007 – 11:40 pm
I’ve mentioned the website Edge.org on several occasions; it is a fascinating place, an online salon where some of the world’s brightest minds exchange ideas — and occasionally “cross hands”, as we say in the martial-arts racket. In its most recent newsletter, its founder, John Brockman offers us the site’s annual recommended-reading list, and laments the absence of similar material in any of the more prominent year-end literary roundups:
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December 20, 2007 – 11:55 pm
This is a busy time, and although there are some weighty topics to return to, I think they may have to wait until things quiet down a bit.
But there’s a bottomless well of entertaining material to pass along, and tonight I offer a tasty morsel.
From my old friend, the great recording engineer Larry Alexander, comes a link to a delightful animation of the Drifters performing a Christmas classic.We hear lead singer Bill Pinkney as Santa, and the late Clyde McPhatter providing the high notes. Here it is. Enjoy.
December 19, 2007 – 11:50 pm
One of the pitfalls of airing one’s thoughts in public on a daily basis is that one’s thoughts vary in quality, and some are better left unexpressed. I wrote a post a few days ago about falsifiability and theism that was a pretty poor piece of work, and so I have taken it down. Apologies to all.
December 19, 2007 – 12:51 am
I’ve learned a new word: whalefall. It refers to the effect of reduced buoyancy upon deceased cetaceans, and came up today in an interesting and educational context.
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December 18, 2007 – 1:47 am
Here’s an entertaining article on pentagonal tilings. (I worked rather late tonight…)
December 17, 2007 – 12:21 am
The city government here in Gotham has been wringing its hands for some time now about how to reduce traffic congestion, which is indeed very bad. The suggestions that have been aired so far have generally taken the form of small-bore monetary disincentives: a fee for driving below 96th street during the week, tolls on the East River bridges, and so forth. These have been met, in each instance, with predictable opposition from whichever group is about to get its ox gored. For example, we Brooklynites were vociferously defended earlier today by our plucky and voluble champion, borough president Marty Markowitz, against a proposed eight-dollar toll on the Brooklyn Bridge, on the grounds that it would be blatantly discriminatory. (The logic may or may not be valid, but the passion was genuine.)
If I may, I think I have the answer. All that should be necessary is to take, quite at random, a dozen or so cars each week off the streets of Manhattan, give the drivers exactly sixty seconds to remove their belongings, and then crush the vehicles into compact lozenges of scrap metal. Under such a system there would be no burdensome tolls, and nary a whiff of discrimination. Given that far more cars must surely be destroyed each week by random events such as steam-pipe explosions, building collapses, helicopter mishaps, high-speed police chases, and drug-gang quarrels, the effect would be, for the most part, purely psychological. But I’ll bet after a month or two you’d be able to hop in your car on a Friday at lunchtime and drive river to river in two minutes flat.
If you’re lucky.
December 13, 2007 – 11:55 pm
It may not have escaped your notice that the readable content available on the World Wide Web, though generally of very high quality in terms of both educational utility and literary style, contains a sparse admixture of comparatively shoddy material. This is, of course, an unavoidable consequence of the democratic nature of the Internet, and until now it seemed that there was nothing that could be done.
There are some very clever people in the world, however, and fortunately for the rest of us, a few of them have now applied their talents to this problem, with promising results. Have a look here.
December 13, 2007 – 12:52 am
After eleven hours in the office (and an hour each way to get there and back), I’m simply too depleted tonight, dear readers, to whip up a new tub of froth. But there’s no need to look so glum, because I still have a little treat for you all. As it happens, my old friend Eugene Jen has sent along a transcript of a slender volume written long ago by the great P.T. Barnum on the subject of “money-getting”. His advice is timeless, and his style is engaging, as you might well imagine. You can find it here.
December 12, 2007 – 12:14 am
I’ve found another fun way to waste your time: a website that ranks the “education level” of your favorite blogs.
I should warn you that I have absolutely no idea how the rankings are determined. Perhaps the algorithm is based upon complexity of sentence structure (such as, for example, the use of parenthetical clauses); maybe it looks for indicators such as proper compound-adjective hyphenation, occurrences of sesquipedalian words, or usage of words, once common, that have now fallen into desuetude.
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December 10, 2007 – 10:41 pm
Have you ever heard of symbolics.com? I hadn’t either. But this humble domain has an important distinction: it was the first .com name ever registered.
If you’re curious, you can find a list of the first 100 here.
December 9, 2007 – 11:55 pm
As one of the wretched unbelievers that Mitt Romney has now clearly identified as foes of God’s favorite country, I’d like, as a further act of sedition, to share with you an excellent speech that Sam Harris gave to a roomful of atheists back in late September. Harris has a supple mind, and he has been keeping it limber. Among the points he makes in this excellent piece are several that may have ruffled some feathers even among the damned souls in attendance.
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December 8, 2007 – 12:32 am
It should come as no surprise that Christopher Hitchens had something to say about Mitt Romney’s speech last night. From his latest piece in Slate, a sample:
Romney does not understand the difference between deism and theism, nor does he know the first thing about the founding of the United States. Jefferson’s Declaration may invoke a “Creator,” but, as he went on to show in the battle over the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, he and most of his peers did not believe in a god who intervened in human affairs or in a god who had sent a son for a human sacrifice. These easily ascertainable facts are reflected in the way that the U.S. Constitution does not make any mention of a superintendent deity and in the way that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention declined an offer (possibly sarcastic), even from Benjamin Franklin, that they resort to prayer to compose their differences. Romney may throw a big chest and say that God should be “on our currency, in our pledge,” and of course on our public land in this magic holiday season, but James Madison did not think that there should be chaplains opening the proceedings of Congress or even appointed as ministers in the U.S. armed forces. Trying to dodge around this, and to support his assertion that the founders were religious in the Christian sense, Romney drones on about a barely relevant moment of emotion in 1774 and comes up with the glib slogan that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Any fool can think of an example where freedom exists without religion””and even more easily of an instance where religion exists without (or in negation of) freedom.
Amen. Read the whole thing here.
December 7, 2007 – 1:26 pm
Well, we’re all still drying off after our dousing last night from Mitt Romney’s Gatorade barrel of holy water. Like JFK in 1960, Romney saw that his campaign was imperiled by a controversial religious affiliation; in this case, however, the risk was not that he was afraid of being seen as some sort of religious kook, but rather that he might be seen as the wrong sort of religious kook. Despite previous assurances that the particulars of a President’s religion don’t matter, as long as he has plenty of it, Mitt now feels the need to reassure the fundamentalist Protestant Republican base that he is every bit as tight with Jesus as they are, and that trivial details — such as polygamy, or that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, and so forth — need not come between them.
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December 6, 2007 – 10:59 pm
I was gratified today to learn that the album Borrowed Time, which I recorded and mixed last winter for my old pal, the great jazz guitarist Steve Khan, has just been nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Latin Jazz Album” category. Steve is an outstandingly creative musician, and he certainly deserves this nomination. The record is a splendid example of his talents not only as a player, but also as composer and arranger, and the performances — by Steve, John Patitucci, Jack DeJohnette, Randy Brecker, Bob Mintzer, Manolo Badrena, Ralph Irizarry, and other luminaries — are of exceptional quality. I’m proud to have been at the console for this project.
You can read a typical review here.
December 5, 2007 – 6:14 pm
Okay, after a sobering preliminary dose of Darwinian nihilism, time for a few yuks. Meet Mrs. Hughes.
December 5, 2007 – 3:42 pm
With a “hat tip” to the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, here is Garry Kasparov’s account of his recent arrest and imprisonment (as noted in these pages last week).
December 5, 2007 – 12:58 am
In Daniel Dennett’s most important book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he makes with brilliant clarity the case that Darwin’s great insight — arguably, I think, the greatest ever had by anyone, so far at least — is, as Dennett calls it, a “universal acid”, eating at the foundations of many of Man’s smugly cherished notions about himself. I believe he is right about this, but I have also thought for some time now that even Dennett, arch-naturalist that he is, has stopped short of acknowledging what is perhaps the most unsettling conclusion of Darwinism:
There are no objective moral truths.
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December 4, 2007 – 1:10 am
There’s much more that I want to say about the important questions raised in the previous post, but for tonight I just want to let you know about a website I’ve just run across. It’s called Philosophy Talk, and it’s associated with a radio show by the same name. The show is hosted each week by two Stanford University philosophers: Ken Taylor, the chairman of the philosophy department, and John Perry, the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy.
The website offers downloadable recordings of archived programs for a nominal fee, but if you don’t want to pay for your own copies you can listen to them as streaming audio at no cost.
There are an awful lot of shows in the archive, featuring some well-known guests. Topics include Consciousness, with David Chalmers; The Mystery of Mind, with John Searle, Predicting the Future, with Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan); Intelligent Design, with Daniel Dennett; Philosophy and Neuroscience, with Patricia Churchland, and dozens and dozens more, on all the Big Questions: free will, religion, truth, art, beauty, love, virtue, time, evil, you name it. It looks like a hugely entertaining resource.
As I’m always saying, there just aren’t enough hours in a day. Or days in a life.
You can find the site here. Onto the sidebar it goes.
December 2, 2007 – 11:46 pm
Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a Muslim zealot.
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December 2, 2007 – 12:57 am
Zoologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins has become a household name lately — not because of his decades of creative academic work, and his outstandingly informative and accessible books on biology and the Darwinian paradigm, but because of his in-your-face denial of God — which has probably, on balance, earned him more enemies than supporters here in the ultra-religious United States. And I’d be the first to admit, fan that I am, that his “people skills” are perhaps not everything they could be, and that he might actually advance his cause — one with which I am in general agreement — more effectively if he were able to make his perfectly reasonable point a tad less condescendingly.
But however you feel about the man, he is a disciplined professional, and he does his homework. My old PubSub pal Eugene Jen has just sent me an excellent example, both of Dawkins’s thoroughness and some outstanding blogospheric geekery. Have a look here.
November 30, 2007 – 11:35 pm
After a truly debilitating holiday bacchanal last night, followed (almost immediately, it seemed) by a long day at work, I’m far too pooped to post. But I do have something interesting for you to read, if you like.
Anyone who pays attention to scientific and technological topics (or who reads the little messages generated by email spam filters) has probably heard of Bayes’ Theorem. If you’ve ever wondered what it was all about, you need wonder no more. Eliezer Yudkowsky has put together a wonderful essay about Reverend Thomas Bayes, “by far the most enigmatic figure in mathematical history”, and his marvelous theorem. Have a look here.
November 29, 2007 – 1:49 am
Readers of the New York Times will be familiar with Verlyn Klinkenborg, who contributes marvelous little essays to the editorial page. He lives on a small farm in upstate New York (“upstate” being a preposterously Gotham-centric term for the 97% of New York State that isn’t part of New York City or Long Island), and most of his pieces are evocative miniatures about rural life. I admire his writing very much; it is eloquent, graceful, and richly expressive.
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November 27, 2007 – 11:06 pm
Having set such a breezy tone with my previous post, I’m sorry to have to get back to more serious matters. But I’ve just been presented with further evidence, in case any was lacking, that Western civilization is indeed circling the drain: apparently the first season of Sesame Street, from way back in 1969, has just been released on DVD — and such delicate creatures, such timorous little milquetoasts, have we become in a mere 38 years that the recordings have been marked as unsuitable for children.
No wonder the barbarians are at the gate. Learn more here.
November 27, 2007 – 1:18 am
It is difficult for a thoughtful person to get into his fifties without a persistent and lurking awareness of our mortal brevity. At this point in life even those who have been fortunate enough to have been spared frequent doses of calamity have lost a good friend or a family member, and by the half-century mark even the best-cared-for bodies are showing signs of irreversible and accumulating wear. This simple fact — that we die — is, due to the curious malformations of our psyche, something that we either go out of our way to avoid, like the landlady to whom our rent is in arrears, or that we ogle with palpitating, pornographic fascination. It is a focal point of all that we do not understand and cannot conceive. It confronts us not only with the unimaginable prospect of the evaporation of our subjective awareness (though why that should be such a horror, given that it is simply the state we occupied for all the eons preceding our birth, and given also that that which does not exist cannot suffer), but also deepens the mystery of our subjective experience of time.
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November 25, 2007 – 10:56 pm
We note that former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has been arrested in Russia for leading a protest rally. According to reports he has been sentenced to five days in jail.
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November 25, 2007 – 12:49 am
About two weeks ago, I posted a little item called The Teflon God, about the highly evolved and adaptive unfalsifiability of religious “memeplexes”, in response to an item by William Vallicella.
My post attracted the notice of Dennis Mangan, proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, and he commented on it in a post of his own, which in turn prompted me to respond here. The discussion has carried on since then over at Dennis’s place, where he has since posted a third item in the series.
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November 24, 2007 – 12:20 am
It was a long day at work; I didn’t get home until after ten, and haven’t had time to prepare anything for tonight. But, saving the day, my friend Jess Kaplan has brought an awfully provocative story to our attention. The topic is an exotic one, right at the edges of human knowledge and understanding, and I am certainly not in an position to comment on it tonight. It comes to us from Lawrence Krauss, for whom I have a great deal of respect. Have a look here.
November 22, 2007 – 1:45 pm
I’m too busy with the delightful chores of feast-preparation to write at length, so I just wanted to extend warmest wishes to all of you. High on the long list of things I have to be thankful for is the community of new friends I have met here at waka waka waka.
November 21, 2007 – 12:06 am
I don’t usually go in for sensational, gruesome stories in these pages, but having spent so much time today wrangling with commenters on the previous post, well, what the heck. Have a look here.
November 19, 2007 – 11:09 pm
I might as well not keep the media on tenterhooks any longer. At the risk of confirming suspicions that I am nothing more than a Republican tool ((Actually, I am a registered Democrat.)), I hereby let it be known that, as regards the bouquet of presidential candidates on offer this time around, the one most likely to pick up the official waka waka waka endorsement — so far at least — is Rudolph Giuliani. He has his peculiarities, to be sure, but they are not of the sort that bother me, and he is intelligent, principled, and consistent.
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November 18, 2007 – 3:55 am
I’m still in southern California, and have had no time for writing today. So here is some more Richard Feynman for you. This clip is about ten minutes long, and unfortunately begins in mid-sentence; of particular interest, however, is the section from about 5:15 on, in which he talks about the built-in uncertainty of science, the nature of doubt, and how hard it is for someone constituted as he is simply to “believe”.
Feynman articulates my own feelings about all of this almost exactly. How sad that he is gone.
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November 17, 2007 – 3:20 am
One of the men I admire most — a genuine intellectual hero — is the coruscatingly brilliant (and untimely departed) physicist Richard Feynman (he was from Brooklyn, of course).
Here he is.
November 16, 2007 – 6:41 am
I’m in San Marcos, San Diego County, California, for a couple of days, visiting my father. After a two-hour weather delay at JFK, another 50 minutes queued up on the runway waiting to take off, a six-hour flight, a fifteen-minute wait at LAX for an avaliable gate, a twenty-minute wait for luggage, and an hour and a half to pick up a car and drive down here, I have just arrived at the no-frills but serviceable Ramada Limited of San Marcos, at 2:30 a.m. (that’s 5:30 a.m. Gotham time).
So no post tonight.
November 14, 2007 – 11:50 pm
You may have noticed that a great many people seem to really, really hate George W. Bush. Here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of the “bluest” neighborhoods in America, there’s a tacit assumption on the part of everyone you meet that you, too, really, really hate George W. Bush. And why do all the people here make that assumption? It’s because they themselves really, really hate George W. Bush, and because everyone else they know around here really, really hates George W. Bush too.
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November 14, 2007 – 1:06 am
Thanks to our friend Dennis Mangan, the curmudgeonly proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, for commenting at his website on our recent post The Teflon God. Dennis — with whom, by the way, we generally agree about most things — raises the objection, often made, that some of the worst brutality in recent history was committed by atheistic regimes. This is undeniably true, but I think that it misses the main point, which is that these horrors ought more reasonably to be charged against totalitarian, Utopian, social-engineering schemes — which often take the form of secular “religions” themselves, as I mentioned in this post — than to atheism per se, which, in contrast to most religions, asserts no normative ideology of its own. Indeed, I would lay much of the responsibility for the mass brutality of the Russian, Chinese, and Khmer Rouge regimes upon the pernicious nature of Communism itself, which can only enforce equality of wealth by institutionalizing an enormous inequality of power, with predictably corrupting effect.
The mistake here, then, I think, is to confuse “Godless and wicked” with “Godless, therefore wicked”.
November 13, 2007 – 12:32 am
The battle rages unabated between the pious and the heathens. Here’s tonight’s salvo:
All things dull and ugly, All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty, The Lord God made the lot;
Each little snake that poisons, Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom, He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous, All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous, The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet, Each beastly little squid.
Who made the spikey urchin? Who made the sharks? He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous, All pox both great and small.
Putrid, foul and gangrenous, The Lord God made them all.
– From Monty Python, of course.
November 12, 2007 – 1:46 am
I apologize for the sloppy editing of yesterday’s post. I try to be careful, but it is in the nature of daily blogging that occasionally one’s vigilance will waver, and poorly proofread material will go into print. The post contained both a repeated passage and a mistaken double negative, both of which have been corrected.
I do seem to have been harping on religion and politics too much lately, but unfortunately I’m reminded daily how important they are. There is vociferous debate all around, and I hate to let some of what I read go unrebutted.
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November 11, 2007 – 12:10 am
As you know, the debate between theists and a-theists is heating up a bit lately. (That we can even have such a debate is a healthy trend, considering that in earlier days such disputes were resolved by burning the nonbeliever at the stake.) There will, of course, be no resolution of it, as theists make claims that are carefully tuned to be unfalsifiable, then insist that, simply by virtue of being unfalsifiable, they are every bit as respectable as models that include no supernatural agents. (One of this faction’s most articulate spokesmen is Dr. William Vallicella, who has joined the battle again in recent posts, and who defends his theism with considerable agility.)
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November 9, 2007 – 11:45 pm
Some pressing personal matters having laid claim to my attention these past two days, I have had no time for writing. So for tonight, it’s “America’s Finest News Source” to the rescue, with two important stories. The first describes a startling discovery that might be just what our flagging economy needs, and the second follows a great man of letters on his mission to preserve a vital cultural resource.
November 8, 2007 – 4:48 pm
A new book focuses on the lifelong loyalty and admiration that Winston Churchill, whom I consider one of the very greatest men in all of Western history, held for the Jews. I’ve just heard about it today, in a Wall Street Journal opinion-page item, but I’m sure I’ll be getting a copy. The article itself is worth a look too. An excerpt:
After the war, Churchill felt that the most fitting response to the Holocaust would be to punish those guilty of the most horrific crimes against the Jews and to fulfill the promise of a Jewish homeland that he and Britain had made almost 30 years earlier. When Ernest Bevin, Britain’s Labour Party foreign minister, hesitated to recognize Israel nine months after its founding, for fear of inflaming Arab opinion, Churchill swung back hard: “Whether the Right Honorable Gentleman likes it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years.” Israel was just recompense, Churchill felt, not only for what the Jews of Europe had lost but for what they had given to civilization over the centuries.
This view, of course, no longer prevails. Today the existence of Israel is apparently something to be regretted, even deplored, not only in Arab capitals but in European ones and on American university campuses. Paradoxically, such feelings intensified after 9/11, an event that should have made us all aware of who the friends of Western civilization really are–and who its enemies. Martin Gilbert’s book reminds us that anti-Semitism is the dark turn of the modern mind against itself, and a form of cultural patricide.
You can read the whole piece here.
November 8, 2007 – 12:03 am
I’m too lazy to write anything tonight, so it’s Hitchens to the rescue. No, not that Hitchens, but his brother Peter, who writes for the UK Sunday Mail.
The item at hand deals with a pet peeve of my own: the pretentious and unnecessary revision of familiar place-names. In my day Ceylon has become Sri Lanka, Peking Beijing, Cambodia Kampuchea, Bombay Mumbai, Burma Myanmar, and so forth. It is a great bloody nuisance, and I am not the only one who thinks so, as we learn here.
November 7, 2007 – 12:59 am
The discussion of Divine Command Theory linked to in yesterday’s post is fascinating for me in more ways than one. I find it of interest not only in itself, as a thoughtful examination of an ancient and vexatious philosophical problem, but also on another, deeper level as well.
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November 6, 2007 – 12:54 am
Given that I have arranged to sell off most of each day to a medium-sized international corporation, leaving me in possession of only a few meager hours each evening in which to pursue my own diverse interests, I find myself, as does anyone whose assets are insufficient to satisfy his needs, having to scrimp and budget. So this evening, rather than spend an hour or two meticulously whittling into shape an original blog-post of my own, I gave the time over to what I knew would be some interesting reading — and, careful shopper that I am, I was well satisfied with the purchase.
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November 4, 2007 – 11:48 pm
Readers may be pleased to know that we did not in fact perish in this weekend’s storm, and are once again safely back in Gotham.
I will say, though, that it was quite a ride: the winds did indeed perform as expected, knocking down many trees, and by Saturday afternoon had blacked out the entire outer Cape from Eastham up through Truro. Saturday night was, I must say, rather a grim business, and a fine display of malevolent, elemental fury. (Mighty dark, too.) But our sturdy little house emerged unscathed.
By Sunday morning Noel had moved on, and the skies were clear. As it turned out, though, more peril lay in store.
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November 3, 2007 – 2:41 pm
As promised, the former Hurricane Noel is giving Cape Cod a virile rogering. The outer Cape — a narrow, longitudinal wisp of sand that comprises the picturesque villages of Chatham, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown — juts a long way out into the Atlantic, and is getting a far stiffer dose than points west.
I’m writing from a wooded hilltop in Wellfleet (on the west side of town, just off Chequessett Neck Road), and while the house itself appears to be in no immediate danger of being hurled from its moorings, I am less confident about the trees all round, which are having a very stressful day. Fortunately, the dead pine I mentioned yesterday, which stands only about three feet from the deck at the north end of the house, has already lost most of its branches, so the wind is having a hard time getting a purchase on what remains.
The worst, though, is apparently yet to come, with wind gusts up to 90 or 100 m.p.h. predicted for the early evening. It may well be that we will be losing electrical power at some point, which of course will mean that we will be off the air either until it is restored, or we flee back to Gotham. If, however, our number’s really up (and I must say it is getting awfully windy outside), well, it has been a pleasure getting to know you, friends, and don’t forget to browse our archives.
November 2, 2007 – 10:10 pm
We’re up at our little retreat on the far end of Cape Cod tonight, awaiting the arrival of the former Hurricane Noel, which is supposed to give these parts a pretty good thumping over the next 24 hours or so. I’m glad to be here for the storm — not only because I enjoy dramatic weather, which I do, but also because there’s a dead pine tree right outside that I haven’t got around to cutting down yet, and if it falls on the house I’d like to know about it sooner rather than later.
It’s been such a lazy day that I haven’t prepared anything much for tonight’s edition, so I’ll just pass along a couple of items that I happen to have lying around.
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October 31, 2007 – 11:31 pm
From our old friend Peter Kranzler comes a link and a question. The link is to this news item, which tells us that the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, has been ordered to pay $10.9 million to relatives of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq, after church members jeered at people attending his funeral.
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October 30, 2007 – 11:34 pm
I’ve been a fan of Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, for a very long time. Though you may not be familiar with him, he is one of the more influential figures in late 20th-century American music, and without question one of the oddest.
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October 29, 2007 – 10:20 pm
Which animals live the longest? That’s right: clams. And according to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, we have a new champion. Learn more here.