Poetic Justice

How fitting is it that the last poet laureate of the Bush reign is a married lesbian?

Door #8: I’m Just a Nutcracker Nerd

I went to see the Pennsylvania Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker every year from the time I was four until I was in high school. And I spent hours with the Russian dance and the Waltz of the Flowers and the Sugar Plum Fairy playing on the phonograph in my bedroom while I improvised my own choreography to the entire Suite.

Nowadays, I’m more of a Hard Nut kinda gal, but I really am a sucker for all things Nutcracker. So it’s not surprising that I thrilled to this version of the Sugar Plum theme assembled entirely from samples of sounds produced by tweaking, banging and plucking various bicycle parts.

And yes, I know it’s an ad, but I still can’t resist. My only complaint: every Nutcracker nerd knows it’s a celesta, not a glockenspiel.

Petri Dish Paintings

Professor Eshel Ben-Jacob from Tel Aviv University photographs the patterns made by bacteria growing on petri dishes.

Ben-Jacob’s Web site features a gallery of microbial art. He writes:

While the colors and shading are artistic additions, the image templates are actual colonies of tens of billions of these microorganisms. The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature.

(Via Pruned)