From YouTube: The City of Davis California is considering a bill to make it illegal to have a fire in your fireplace. Here's our public comments to the city council.  
Via Scenery.
 
R. Stevie Moore 11/11/2009
 
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Low (Magazine) Profile of R. Stevie Moore: Improviser, composer, arranger, producer, musical conceptualist, comedy writer, vocal stylist, filmmaker, sketchpad artist, drama example, self-taught instrumentalist and bon vivant, r.stevie moore was born 1952 in nashville TN to famed elvis bass player bob. since '66 rsm has recorded nearly 2,000 songs on over 400 very original homemade albums of alarmingly idiosyncratic variety and styles, often considered a seminal pioneer in the DIY ethic. remaining virtually unknown, he quietly resides in new jersey as curator of his own museum.
 
2000 - 2009 11/11/2009
 
Newsweek compiles the news of the decade, snarkily, in 7 minutes.  I agree with this take from The Awl:

"You'll probably have your own thoughts about what should have been excluded or included, but for me the most jarring thing about this is how so many of the events feel so simultaneously distant and recent. Like, really, that actually happened nine years ago? I don't know if this is just a quirk of my own cranium, or if there really is something to the idea that the onslaught of information we've experienced during the last ten or so years has somehow rewired the way we think." 
 
Kenneth Lonergan 11/08/2009
 
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Interesting article about Kenneth Lonergan the filmmaker and playwright and his current struggles, artistic and otherwise, trying to stage his new play The Starry Messenger.  His film, You Can Count on Me is one of the best of the 90s.
 
Chris Elliott 11/02/2009
 
 
 
I'm not a horror film enthusiast generally but this one looks good and scary. Here's a NYT audio slide show with the director, Ti West, on the 80s aesthetics of the movie.
 
 
 
 
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Are the laws of Back to the Future in play?
From the NYT:
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
 
 
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The Strange Rebirth of Andre Weil will be screening Saturday, October 17th at the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York City!  Tickets for the screening at Brooklyn's Galapagos Art Space are available here.

TSROAW is also screening as part of the Wildsound Film Festival at Toronto's National Film Board of Canada on Thursday, October 29th.  Ticket info is here.

Finally, TSROAW will be screening on Friday, November 13th as part of the Miami Short Film Festival.  The screening will be held at the Cosford Cinema at the University of Miami.  More info on the fest is available here.
 
I Am The Eggman 09/20/2009
 
The Wikipedia entry on the history of I Am the Walrus is full of amazing anecdotes about the origins of the lyrics.  Here's an example as well as a great video of the song from Magical Mystery Tour.

John Lennon: "The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko... I'd seen Allen Ginsberg and some other people who liked Dylan and Jesus going on about Hare Krishna. It was Ginsburg, in particular, I was referring to. The words 'Element'ry penguin' meant that it's naïve to just go around chanting Hare Krishna or putting all your faith in one idol. In those days I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan."