It's About Time!

With enormous snakes swallowing alligators, dogs, turkeys and kitty cats; and with gators in carports and back yards, there's never a dull moment in South Florida. Floridians now may be required to register their pythons.

Now I can sleep at night.

World Mysteries

World-Mysteries.com invites you to "explore lost civilizations, ancient ruins, sacred writings, unexplained artifacts, and science mysteries. Meet subject experts, find related books and resources". Lots of info and photos on numerous sacred sites on the planet. The satellite image gallery is particularly interesting.

The Literary Encyclopedia

The Literary Encyclopedia is "an expanding global literary reference work written by over 1,400 specialists from universities around the world, and currently provides over 3,700 authoritative profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics". In 2007, they'll publish at least 800 new profiles. Also listed are nearly 19,000 works by date, country and genre.

There is a fee to join, but for the bibliophile and the researcher, this seems like a valuable resource.


And while we're on the subject of resources, Ask A Scientist focuses on questions from K-12 students and teachers that are not commonly found in libraries, reference books or text books. The question you submit is emailed directly to volunteer scientists (located throughout the world) and answers will be emailed to the return email address you have provided.

Ask a Scientist deals with astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, computers, general science topics, engineering, environmental and Earth science, mathematics, molecular science, physics, veterinary, weather and zoology.

Remembering Junior Wells

December 9, 1934 – January 15, 1998

Click image for larger view.

Has it really been nine years since Junior died? It seems like only yesterday that he was blowing his harp at the Back Room in Delray Beach on New Year's Eve.

More on Junior from a previous post.

Begonia Blogging

click photo for larger view

A stunning specimen of Begonia 'Benitochiba', from the Yahoo Begonia Group. This Japanese hybrid with silvery leaves, dark green veins and hints of lavender, is a favorite of mine, although begonias with silvery leaves are usually more prone to mildew and harder to grow.

More begonias

The World's Best Congueros

While he was alive, Miguel 'Angá' Díaz, a Grammy-winning Cuban percussionist, played five congas with unparalleled brilliance and mastery. He died unexpectedly last August, in Spain, at the age of 45. What a loss!

Here he is soloing with Irakere in 1994.



The reigning King of the Conga now is Giovanni Hidalgo. Check out this mindboggling solo from the Festival Jazz Plaza 2000, in Havana, Cuba.



Related links:
Ray Barretto
Salsa Night
Jammin'

Europeans are getting taller and taller...

...and Americans aren't. An article in The New Yorker from two years ago details a study of height differences in people around the world.

Over the past thirty years, a new breed of “anthropometric historians” has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives. That’s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries.

In the nineteenth century, Americans were the tallest people in the world. But in the mid twentieth century, something strange happened.

While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.

Sports Giants

The Unfilmables

Screenhead has compiled a list of novels that would be nearly impossible to adapt to film. Some have never been tried. Some have been made with disastrous results. Some bad novels have been made into good films (almost all of Hitchcock's movies); and some, such as Jane Austin's works, are quite easy to adapt. But the works on this list would challenge even the best filmmakers. Among them:

• Ulysses, by James Joyce
• Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
• 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Marquez
• Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
• Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
  

Screenhead does suggest directors who might be the only ones capable of pulling off each adaptation, should anyone be foolhardy enough to try.

Eric Johnson - Manhattan (G3 Live)

Eric Johnson is a guitarist's guitarist from Austin, Texas, who fuses a multitude of musical styles with a mind-boggling technical proficiency and a cool, smooth delivery. Perfection.