Year: 2008

Curvebender’s Kaleidoscope Eyes

One of the most impressive and praiseworthy objects I have ever beheld, held, and owned, is the RTB Book: Recording The Beatles, by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, published under their Curvebender Publishing imprint. As I said a year or so ago, at $100 this book is a bargain.

Curvebender has a new Beatles book coming out, called Kaleidoscope Eyes: A Day In The Life of Sgt. Pepper. It’s a collection of photographs, taken during the day in 1967 when recording began for “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.”

Kaleidoscope Eyes

Limited to 1967 copies, it costs a whopping $495, and at that price I would consider this book to be an extravagent indulgence, so I won’t be buying it. Nevertheless, I hope it sells out and goes up in value.

Over at one of the Wired blogs is this item about a Beatles exhibit at the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, CA. The show is curated by Kehew and Ryan, and features original recording and playback equipment that the Beatles used at Abbey Road Studio 2.

You can hear the classic songs coming out of the same speakers used in the sessions, and gawp at the original technology, some never before seen in public.

Gawp indeed! This is almost irresistibly tantalizing. If the exhibit were in New York, I would go.

In other Beatles related doings, we watched Across The Universe with Eric, who commented that The Beatles are “eternally cool.” That’s good to know. Our enjoyment of the movie benefited greatly from watching it with the Panasonic PT-AX200U video projector.

JetBlue’s Great $1 Headphones

Our trip to Arizona was our first flying on JetBlue. Their claim of extra leg room compared to other airlines is absolutely true. There is no first class or business class section. Only coach, and no full meals, only snacks. Does this approach work? Yes, I think so.

Each seat has its own LCD television, with DirectTV, and some of the flights also have XM Radio. I found various technical problems, including one seat with a dead audio channel and another with TV audio coming through on the radio channel, full volume, with no control over the loudness. But in the seats where everything is working correctly, it’s good stuff.

Jet Blue Headphones

The free headphones JetBlue provides are worthless. Even if you get a working set, don’t bother. For a measly $1 JetBlue sells a much bigger, better, and more comfortable pair of headphones. These things are stunning for the money, easily besting the sound of the $20 Sony headphones I use for long distance running. They’re sold on the honor system, and some of the headphone boxes we saw at JFK are well out of view, making it easy to get away without paying. But why would anybody except a kid or a jerk even consider doing that?

The high end is rolled off a bit, and the detail is slightly veiled, but the bass is pretty good. Overall, the sound is balanced, smooth and easy on the ears. Are these the best $1 headphones in the world? Undoubtedly!

MA AZ MA

Well, we’re back. We’ve been back for a couple of days, but I’ve been clearing snow and decompressing.

We were in Phoenix with my younger sister’s family, seeing our father and one of our older sisters. We drove down to Tucson to see the Pima Air Museum and Biosphere 2, and we had a wonderful dinner with some old friends, DogRat comment writer Cactus Lizzie and her husband.

The running conditions in Arizona this time of year are ideal! Back home they’re anything but.

Our travels were greatly eased and assisted by a Garmin Nuvi 200. It has a few quirks, but this thing is a tremendously useful tool. The freedom from plotting out a route on a map and the elimination of the stress of searching for signs and exits is worth way more than what it cost — $170 with free shipping from Amazon.com. In fact, it’s on sale right now at Amazon for $177.20.

Eric caught a few seconds of video of the Nuvi 200 from the back seat, when we pulling into a shopping center between Tucson and Phoenix to get lunch. This was taken with another nifty new gadget, a Canon Elph SD-1000.
[flv:/Video/2008/FEB/Garmin.flv 440 330]

See “The King of Kong”

Eric wanted to rent the DVD of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and having seen only half of it I am giving it my absolute highest possible recommendation. I had a hard time deciding on a video clip to preview here, but I settled on this one.

[flv:/Video/2008/FEB/KingOfKong.flv 448 252]

I’m not a gamer. My interest is casual. Yet I feel strongly that it is the mentality behind gaming that helped propel us into the technological age we are now in. Hippies, Science Fiction fans, comic book kids, and Rock and Roll combined to give us what we have today. It’s all due as much to cultural change as it is advancements in technology.

This photograph is from the monumentally important article “SPACE WAR: Fanatic Life and Death Among the Computer Bums,” by Stewart Brand, published in the December 7, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone. Yes, that’s right. 1972. The caption reads, “Bruce Baumgart, winner of the Five-Man Free-For-All at the First Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, brandishing control buttons in triumph.”

I am deeply appreciative of the reality that the things we take for granted — telephones, cars, radio, TV, Web browsing — were at some point in the past merely strange ideas. We owe a great deal to the oddballs and misfits who made them possible.