Monday

Saw some Wensleydale at Whole Foods and naturally thought of these guys. Had to buy it. Saw a jar of acacia honey with black truffles in my kitchen, a recent christmas gift, and decided to apply a little of said honey to a slice of the cheese. A little bit of heaven!

The Greek promoter asked our European agent whether we will be performing “Barcelona Nights” in April. Them Greeks sure love the classics…

Wide-screen Apple Mail hack for Macs, courtesy of Aaron Harnly. Download the file here. I love it.

Surprising, or maybe part of the changes that are happening:

Marginal Revolution: China “tiger mother” fact of the day?
China, by the way, has the world’s third highest elderly suicide rate.

I read this article about Ma and Steve Jobs, which lead me to this article about Kobun Chino, and when I looked up the two pieces on my Instapaper account just now I came across this, which I think is lovely:

Buddhists, says HH the Dalai Lama, aren’t asked to believe anything that’s not in accord with reason and experience.

Somewhere along the trail I also read this fascinating article on the cult of masks. (((sounds a bit sensationalistic to me)))

Black Blade Runner glasses

Are all British artists about PR and PR and more PR and outdoing one another in outrageous deeds?

Ektopia » Blog Archive » Sunflower Seeds on Sunflower Seeds
Iocose have catapulted four real sunflower seeds into Ai Weiwei’s exhibit at the Tate Modern. The group of artists now claim that the original 100 million porcelain seeds have become part of their new artwork, titled Sunflower Seeds on Sunflower Seeds.

Yawn.. boring!

Beautiful:
Shyscapes (Vimeo)

2010 Slideshow

For those who could not attend my six solo concerts in California last November I exported my new slideshow as a high quality movie, but the file was nearly 6GB in size. Then I exported is as a much smaller movie (smaller in dimensions and at half the frame-rate) and ended up with a 215MB Quicktime file, which you can view and download here. The movie is silent, but you can play One Guitar, or any of my albums, alongside it.

Saturday

This morning I played Querencia on my guitar, from In the Arms of Love, and thought that it might work really well as a longish (one and a half minutes) intro to Turkish Night. We recorded Turkish Night for the Opium album in 1996. The name was inspired by a memorable night at a fabulous hotel on the Bospherus. After performing earlier that evening the band was sitting in the hotel bar with a couple of German friends who had come to Istanbul to see me. After we drank the bar out of orange juice (lots of screwdrivers), one friend, who was a journalist for German TV in the Turkish capital, suggested cherry jiuce, which is the Turkish juice of choice. So we started drinking cherry juice with vodka. I think we drank the bar out of cherry juice, too. I have to say that cherry juice plus vodka leaves more of a hangover, perhaps because cherries are sweeter than oranges.

Nagra III, IV, IV-s, IS and SN reel to reels – (YouTube)
Lovely video explaining the different models of Nagra tape recorders. Gear porn.

Culture – GOOD
Protesters Are Awesome: Egyptians Form Human Shield to Protect Antiquities

MSNBC Photoblog
An Egyptian anti-government activist kisses a riot police officer following clashes in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, Jan. 28, 2011.

I love that photo!

Philip K. Dick’s Ampek (he turned Ampeg into Ampek) plant, from the book The Simulacra… originally published in 1964!

Now imagine having plants doing some of our computing… Biotech will be the next major wave. Forget silicon and motherboards – that’s so 20th century.