A few readers have gotten on my case for setting the bar too low for this year’s round of New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps rightly so, since my campaigns for 2011 consisted merely of learning to drive stick (which, as reader JD points out, ‘can be learned in one night in a parking lot by a [...]

In response to the Attacking and Defending post from two weeks ago, I received the following emails from friends: Mike: “I didn’t know you were a boxer. i am a pugilist myself, although i haven’t picked up the gloves in about three years. where are you sparring?” Luke: “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing” [And a bit later:] “I wondered [...]

In the ‘Lifestyles of the undead’ post below, I know-it-all-ishly implied that nobody’s yet done a modern update/parody of the those anatomical drawings where the subject is obligingly peeling off his or her own flesh. It turns out that my friend SP has done exactly this: “I wanted to show you the homage I drew [...]

I blogged a few months ago on Franco Grignani, distinctive zebra of the design kingdom: Reader DS alerts me to the existence of so-called Dazzle Camouflage, the British navy’s unlikely attempt to appropriate the signature black-and-white op-art forms of Grignani and other Futurists for the purpose of military camouflage: The technique was developed by English [...]

Reader JW brings our attention to the Dutch Concert, which I hadn’t heard of before. The Dutch Concert, interestingly, gets two different definitions, both – of course – unflattering to the Dutch but different nevertheless. One vein of opinion classifies it as a general racket, cacophony, riot, row, ruckus, rumpus, uproar. The other defines it [...]

Reader JS – despite finding the Muluqèn Mèllèssè song I posted ‘nice but not memorable’ – pluckily set out for his local Ethiopian-manned newsstand to get some information on the mysterious singer. Here’s what transpired: I wrote the name of the song and the singer on a sheet of paper and showed it to the [...]

In response to the Pneumatically Prague post, readers TK and DS sent along this link with more info on the system, including this impossibly-cool photo of the control system… … and this description of what sounds like a really fun technological show-down between pneumatic tube, messenger and telex system: There was an experiment in about [...]

Guest-blogger Grandjoe checks in from his vacation in Vermont on a peculiar fusion of baseball, charity and cuisine: This week, on June 30, the Woodstock Vt. community supper celebrated the the 119th anniversary of Casey Stengel’s birth. The menu, as always, comprised, 5 courses.  This week: an hors d’oeuvre of baba ganush and bread; creamy [...]

Guest-blogger Grandjoe checks in by email on the subject of the real-life Colonel Sanders, whom I blogged on a few weeks ago: In the mid-1950s, a friend of mine from college and his family owned a cabin in Keene Valley, NY that had previously been owned by Colonel Sanders. The latter left there a collection [...]

Reader JS agitates for a Pat Boone post and thereby provides a nice blog entry on the subject himself: Why don’t you or Krafty do a music blog on Pat Boone, the loathsome twit from the 1950s who is still around? He was sort of the Great White Hope of Pap (as distinguished from Pop [...]