BLAST the audio. It's a test of an FI engine. Sounds like a dog growling and barking toward the end there.

I love these dudes. Crank the audio and listen to the overtones.

...is the name of an album by Paco de Lucia. I first owned the album like 15 years ago, but it was stolen from my apt in LA. I just bought it again about a month ago. For some reason I always assumed that Fuente y Caudal were two characters from a Spanish story, sort of like Platero y Yo.

I was wrong. I knew fuente meant fountain, but that's it. Fuente y Caudal, as far as I have now learned, are hydrodynamic terms to describe a river, fuente meaning source, caudal meaning flow, or discharge (i.e. how much water moves through a given space in a given time).

This now makes Fuente y Caudal a totally cool title for a flamenco album. Source and Flow...one thinks of the torrents of music coming out of Paco. Also makes me think of how flamenco songs (each of which is one of only a handful of types: solea, bulerias, fandandgo, etc.) don't really seem distinct from one another. And many types -- solea, alegrias, bulerias -- are just the same rhythmic pattern (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12) at different speeds. They are just different variations on a theme, within a particular rhythm...different streams off the same river fed by the same source.

that's the deep thought for the day.

if you have Quicktime, iTunes or a video iPod, download this video of Paco playing a Solea. I'd give my left and right ones to play like this.

In and around Ajijic...

flyin' in, at mom and skip's pool, with local kids a the pool, sunset on the beach...

this is where Andrea and I live. the only newsworthy part is when they note that the Dominicans are moving out not because they're "movin' on up" like the previous immigrant groups, but just because they can't afford to live here anymore.

its funny, just walking around here, you can definitely perceive the layers of culture that have caked down onto the prior ones. walking up broadway, like I did last year, you still see a ton of Irish bars, now mostly full of Dominicans, with the odd Irish holdout who seems out of place when he steps outside to smoke and watch the world go by. our building, which used to be almost entirely european jews is now, i'd say, half yuppies like me and andrea.

but i don't know why this is news. Little Italy no longer exists, other then maybe one block. I guess Chinatown is still Chinatown. my old neighborhood on the upper east side used to be hungarian and german, and they're just gone. the village used to be gay, now its chelsea.

i suppose there's a point to noticing the change (see prior post), but other than that it feels like saying gas used to cost 40 cents a gallon.

This is a story about a skydiver who survived a 12,000 ft fall when his chutes failed, with video.

And these are magnified images of bugs killed on windshields.

Both things that go splat (or normally would go splat in the case of the skydiver), and both hit on a theme I often think about, which is how the scale (both physical and temporal) of events affects our perception of them.

found both here, a good site for the odd story here and there and a lot of stories about geeks hating the RIAA and Microsoft.

read this one too. i myself have sent around the hockey stick.

read it. found it here, via here.