Category: Art, Entertainment, Sports & Music
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The past one month has been an embarrassment of riches for sports fans who love soccer and tennis. Being one of them, I have been majorly distracted lately, mostly by the fast, furious and elegant action on the soccer fields of South Africa. In fact, my favorite tennis tournament at Wimbledon went by without my…
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I usually keep an eye on any interesting exhibitions that come to town. But I very nearly missed the fabulous Alice Neel – Painted Truths that was showing at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts since March. Fortunately someone on Facebook brought it to my attention a few days ago. Even then I was hard pressed to find…
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Another famous saying from outer space turns out to be not quite what we think it was. "Houston, we have a problem," is a catchall phrase for SNAFUs that happen even outside of Houston but that is not exactly what the Apollo 13 astronauts actually said when they heard a bang aboard the spaceship. In…
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Meet a composer without arms, legs or human faculties. Emily Howell is the name given to a software program created by David Cope: "With Cope’s help, Emily Howell has written three original opuses of varying length and style, with another trio in development. Although the first recordings won’t be released until February, reactions to live…
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Over at Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio, we've just finished a new show about legendary saxophonist and big band arranger Frank Foster's ambivalence about love. If Valentine's Day left you with similarly mixed feelings, you might find the music a comfort. It's a combination of modern "post-swing" big band writing along with some of the…
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That's a bit of a purposely sef-deprecatory sounding title. I too like the picture. But it is true that of all my paintings this was my mother's favorite. When I posted an Obamaicon of myself here, I had thought that was as close as I was likely to come to publishing a true likeness on the blog. I still do not plan to…
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From the NYT, a Well Blog post about Olympic athletes, many of whom will undoubtedly be taking Epo (the new blood doping), which is dangerous, maybe very dangerous: There’s a well-known survey in sports, known as the Goldman Dilemma. For it, a researcher, Bob Goldman, began asking elite athletes in the 1980s whether they would…
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Is it her art or her age that charms? A Twisted Sense of Humor Is it a leaf or..?
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Sarah Palin made it to my corner of the woods, this Saturday afternoon. "Thousands" lined up to meet her, per the gushing report from the Washington PA Observer-Reporter (Note, the website page had been read 297 times by the time I saw it. Are there thousands of people in Washington PA, or was the true…
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The Chinese enthusiastically await President Obama. He is by far the most popular foreign leader in China. To commemorate the visit artists have created the likeness of Obama in Chinese Red Guard uniform on t-shirts and other paraphernalia (not for sale) and a flaming Obama statue (because he is so hot).
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Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of the New Yorker was interviewed at Big Think about various aspects of humor – its roots, triggers, social utility and form. In the following videos, Mankoff answers some questions: How do men and women use humor in a social situation? When does humor, which almost always originates in bad taste, work effectively?…
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While we are on the subject of You Tube videos: Somehow, it is still hard for me to believe that this guy was my representative in the US Congress for many miserable years. Beginning around 1:30 the video becomes ridiculously scary. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or throw up! How will all this booty shaking affect the…
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