air traffic controlling

i couldn't find any music stored on my computer that i wanted to listen to so i turned to the web...

radiolab -
is a great program, i listened to the episode they have in the 3rd season all about zoos. i like the story about the zoo in spokane washington that was the first to put captive born gorillas in an outdoor cage with grass & trees & rocks. it's great and reminded me of the enigma of kausper hauser by werner herzog which is about a man who was raised in a small room with no human contact and then is suddenly left in the middle of the town, naked. the head gorilla came out into the enclosure and walked around, sat down, stared up at the sky where crows were flying, looked in a small pool made in the artificial creek, and then noticed the humans, standing just on the otherside of a large glass window. The gorilla dug his hand deep into the sandy soil and pulled out the one piece of concrete rubble that somehow escaped the construction crew who had specific instructions to remove anything a gorilla might be able to pick up and throw and held it aloft. then he set it down, walked over to the creek and his family joined him in the sunshine.

air traffic control
this is a fantastic site that streams live feeds from air traffic control towers all across the world. there are long stretches of silence but sure enough someone always wants to land or ask about the weather. check it out!

Photo copyright . everything is white if you wait long enough . 2008 . HODGES & CO. all rights revealed.

selecting an album

one of my consistent toys during the earliest foggy years of my infanthood was the lunchbox sized portable yellow & red bumpy plastic disk player. i had a pretty good selection of records; blue, yellow, red. i forget exactly how it made sound come from those hard bologna-slice-sized platters. but it did. they were fairly jammin tunes if i remember correctly, not your standard nursery rhyme fare or waltzes, just plain old simple two four beats. plunk... pluank... plunk.

this all started thanks to taree, a sweet woman who lives in south berkeley with a bandsaw, a lathe, fruit trees, a winter garden, shaggy bamboo, mounds of wood shavings, rotting apples on the ground from an ornery apple tree that had sprouted up from its rootstock with feral fruit, and until recently a Yamaha C-2 Pre-Amplifier that she was giving away for free via the freecycle alternaconomy.

it's a pretty nice unit. so i hooked it up to my system tonight.
the speakers are an older pair of 8" oak cabinet infinitys. there's a yamaha natural sound stereo amplifier ca-1000 II with a finnicky mode but a nice silent volume knob. Into aux1 of the ca-1000 i run the new Yamaha C-2 Pre-amp (Cycle on terry), and into that i've got two signals; one from my laptop via a gold plated heavy duty triple core RCA cord (into the AUX input) and the other from Sage's parents' turntable, a delidded Technics SL-D2 that was recently cleaned, oiled, balanced, and leveled (into the Phono 1.)

while my audio gear is by no means jaw-dropping, i have to admit that with the new pre-amp it just sounded significantly better. all the audiophiliacs always drone on & on about the complete necessity of a really good preamp and, i'll admit, i've always just shushed them under the carpet with the guys who buy the new computer chips for their car to get a gain of like .5HP. in any case, it sounded so good that I couldn't even choose a record record to play, so i just I decided to play all the records straight through from left to right, one at a time, one side at a time.

1. The Beatles - A Hard Days Night Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Un. Art. UAL 3366. (Click HERE for back)

a pretty good album, much better than i expected. a few real knockout gems on here. three hazy instrumentals: and i love her, ringo's theme (this boy) and the classic; a hard day's night. such nice high contrast portraits of them on the back, hamming it up like they really wanted to make it big but weren't quite sure that they would.

NEXT UP...

roy buchanan

yee hah

Photo copyright . some other needle's record . 2008 . HODGES & CO. all rights revealed.