Deal, June 2021

This week’s Five Things…

1. The ongoing saga of the Ever Given. An interesting long read on what happened to cause it to get stuck in the Suez Canal and what has happened since.

2. Franz Ferdinand’s song Take Me Out is about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I did not know that!

3. I find cities and architecture fascinating. So this piece, The 5 coolest trends in urbanism … in Europe, was right up my alley.

4. Where’s Wally but emoji style.

5. “In 1715, a significant chunk of Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Night Watch, including a 2-foot-wide swath from the left side of the painting, was lopped off in order to fit the painting in a smaller space.” Absolute madness! Fortunately, AI has come to the rescue so we can now see what it looks like without its side lopped off.

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Margate, June 2021

This week’s Five Things…

1. One for the musicians and music students. Ploop is a handy tool to help get your head around polyrhythms. It also has a very silly name!

2. The restoration of what looks like a very old watch. Very satisfying to watch!

3. Kurzgesagt’s minute by minute guide to the day the dinosaurs died.

4. I could happily watch this for a very long time!

5. A great twitter thread of random trivia. Twitter at its best.

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Margate, June 2021

This week’s Five Things…

1. Space without the space.

2. I’m really enjoying Dr Jen Gunter’s new podcast, Body Stuff. Episode 1 takes on the “8 glasses of water a day” myth.

3. A nice breakdown from The Verge on all the biggest features announced at Apple’s WWDC conference that will be coming to iPhones, iPads and Macs later this year. I’m particularly looking forward to homescreen widgets on iPads and offline Siri.

4. One of my favourite podcasts, More or Less, is back with a new series.

5. The People of 1381 is a project investigating and tweeting the events of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Very cool!

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Dover, June 2021

This week’s Five Things…

1. Bo Burnham’s comedy special, Inside, is excellent. Clever and funny. A lockdown masterpiece!

2. A great episode of EconTalk with Ian Leslie (the author of Conflicted) on how to disagree better.

3. Word of the day: Gesamtkunstwerk

4. That’s one talented bird!

5. One for musicians and music teachers. I love these examples for explaining the various musical dynamics (piano, forte etc).

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Berlin, April 2015

This week’s Five Things…

1. I absolutely loved this episode of Tape Notes with Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis which delves into the writing and recording process for Foals’ album Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost

2. This Greenpeace advert is very clever. Hits the mark!

3. I discover so much great music through NPR’s Tiny Desk. Butcher Brown is my latest find.

4. Wintergatan, the makers of the amazing Marble Machine are building another music making machine, currently called Marble Machine X. They are documenting the building process on YouTube.

5. I’ve rediscovered my love for Really Bad Chess. If you’re bad at chess but like the idea of chess this might be the game for you.

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ps. I’m taking a week off next week but usual service will resume the following week.