Because I love charts:

http://xkcd.com/798/

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Because I love packaging, culture and, of course, food (even when it looks like an 8 year-old packed it *cough Britain cough*), take a gander at these examples of military meal packaging from around the globe:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/04/weekinreview/20100905_gilbertson.html?ref=weekinreview

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Believe me, Corporate America, you need this.

According to ToneCheck:

Studies show e-mail messages are interpreted incorrectly 50% of the time.* ToneCheck™ is an e-mail plug-in that flags sentences with words or phrases that may convey unintended emotion or tone, then helps you re-write them. Just like Spell Check… but for Tone.

Avoid continuous editing and unnecessary conflict with ToneCheck™.

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http://www.myspace.com/gretasbakery

At Milkboy Coffee here in lovely Ardmore - never Ardless! - PA:
http://www.milkboycoffee.com/events/view_entry.php?id=1497&date=20100408

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Confessions is an audio-visual project by Teitur, composer Nico Muhly and the dutch ensemble Holland Baroque Society. About a year ago, these young and talented artists started a challenging project: composing music for YouTube clips. Even the comments were used as an inspiration for the lyrics and in a short time four wonderful songs were created, all matching the video's in a surprisingly brilliant way.

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How To Make a Sandwich on the Island:

Jack
1. Gather ingredients
2. Point gun at ingredients and shout “HOW DO I MAKE A SANDWICH OUT OF YOU?!?!?”
3. Breathe heavily through your nose as though you were about to hit ingredients
4. Give up and make the sandwich yourself, and eat it bitterly

Kate
1. Make separate sandwiches, one with peanut butter and one with jelly
2. Take a bite of the peanut butter sandwich, declaring it the best
3. Take a bite of the jelly sandwich, declaring it the best
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 ad infinitum
5. Follow peanut butter or jelly sandwich into grave danger

Sawyer
1. Throw the jar of jelly at wall, sneering “I don’t need no sandwich”
2. Call the mascot on the jar of peanut butter lots of clever nicknames
3. Huff and puff and stomp around and grumble a lot
4. When no one’s looking, make perfect, even, symmetrical peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sit in a corner, enjoying every bite

Locke
1. Sit idly by, believing that the ingredients will find a way to make a sandwich out of themselves
2. Lose faith and make the sandwich anyway
3. Realize that you were the instrument by which the ingredients chose to make a sandwich after all
4. Run around the room and grab everyone’s knives, insisting that their sandwiches will do the same in time

Hurley
1. Make sandwich
2. Eat sandwich
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 ad infinitum

Sayid
1. Procure 23 milligrams of uranium-20
2. Set hadron supercollider to eight megajoules
3. Program a sandwich-making macro using Cobol or Visual Basic
4. Act all tough-like

Desmond
1. Eat sandwich
2. Call the sandwich “brother”
3. Place peanut butter slice over jelly slice
4. Spread jelly on the other slice
5. Spread peanut butter on one slice
6. Take two slices of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly

Ben
1. Steal someone else’s sandwich
2. Claim you coerced them into making the sandwich for you all along
3. Say you’ll tell them everything if they make you another sandwich
4. Stare at them all creepy-like

Libby
1. Lay out plans for one of the most intricate, fascinating, and delicious sandwiches of all time
2. Just as you start making it, get shot

Danielle
1. Apply peanut butter
2. Disappear for eight months
3. Apply jelly
4. Disappear for eight months
5. Eat sandwich

Claire
1. Mmmmmmm, peanut butter

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse
1. Make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
2. Have someone take a bite, then tell them it’s a baloney sandwich
3. Make up a whole bunch of other shit, then say you had planned it all along
4. Buy a few yachts

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http://www.npr.org/templates/music/

Or check out "Music Interludes View":

Sure, it's not the most exciting music known to man (or even known to NPR), but the fact that the site includes several ways of finding the music is great.  I still struggle with WXPN's online playlists, especially since they exclude anything heard on World Cafe Live.

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http://sellout.woot.com/Default.aspx?WootSaleId=11617&ts=1264027529&sig=951b98906d0f3643

Seriously, does anyone know where I can sign up for this gig?

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Light brown bearded blue striped beanie for youth

Fetch me a child's head on which to put this!  Or shrink my head on which to put this!

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Alright, so maybe the sloth isn't part of the Chinese zodiac, but Paste magazine's list of Etsy's Very Best Sloth Stuff will certainly have you thinking about nature's slowest multi-clawed creatures for a few minutes.

I especially enjoy Papervictory's Etsy shop above - who knew so many animals had so many things to say?

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There's a long-running legend in my college town of Fredonia, NY that the Marx Brothers - while performing at the historic 1891 Opera House, then part of the vaudeville circuit - were kicked out of town for bringing hookers back to their room.  In response, the dysfunctional nation led by Groucho's Rufus T. Firefly was named "Freedonia" in their next film, Duck Soup:

Despite having alma matered, matriculated and / or otherwise grad-ee-ated from that fine institution, I never did find out what the real story was (if there was one at all) until now.  The story I've always heard is completely fabricated, but there was something akin to a fiasco when the film was released.  According to this 1933 TIME magazine movie review, the mayor of Fredonia took issue with the unflattering use of the village name:

"*Mayor Harry B. Hickey of Fredonia, N. Y. protested to the Marxes: "The name of Fredonia has been without a blot since 1817. I feel it is my duty as Mayor to question your intentions in using the name of our city in your picture."

Back cracked the Marxes: "Your excellency: Our advice is that you change the name of your town. It is hurting our picture. Anyhow, what makes you think you are Mayor of Fredonia? Do you wear a black moustache, play the harp, speak with an Italian accent or chase girls like Harpo? We are certain you do not. Therefore we must be Mayor of Fredonia, not you. The old gray Mayor ain't what he used to be."

No hookers, but I do enjoy the Marx Brothers response, which boils down to an advertisement for the film and family brand.  It would also appear that Mayor Harry B. Hickey never saw any of their films, as I'm almost positive that those very same words were uttered by every Marx Brothers' "villain" - it's like he was just asking to be slandered.

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or, "things that scared me as a kid, part 1."

My parents were big fans of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid, and every Sunday night (at least I remember it being on Sundays) they'd turn on Mystery! and scare me half to death with the Edward Gorey-animated introduction:

There's an alternate version as well - equally terrifying, mostly do to the wailing woman and score by Normand Roger:

Granted, I absolutely love watching this today.  The murder-in-high-Victorian-society imagery and stately-but-macabre score is great, as is the narration - how does someone fill the phrase "a grant from the Mobil corporation" with so much dread?

Was anyone else as traumatized by this as I was?  And why didn't Holmes ever solve any of the cases that occurred immediately before he appeared on screen?

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I'd say more, but the video below says it all.  If only it could record what's played on it, and if only my hopes and dreams hadn't been thwarted time after time by my utter lack of harmonic skills:

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Love All This' Hey Jude Flowchart is pretty great, and the fact that it's categorized under "Nerd" blows the lid off of my own categorization system.

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The bridge has always been the most striking part of the tune, and to watch a master songwriter like Simon weigh his options about where to go next is really fascinating.
"Have you ever reached for your C-sharp and gotten your C-natural instead?" is pretty priceless as well.

If nothing else, think about this:  how badass a songwriter do you have to be for Ray Charles to cover you?

----------------------
Ian Messinger
My Other Centaur...is a LADY Centaur

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You can even upload videos of your own playing and get some one-on-one pointers from Tony Trischka himself.

A video tutorial service and social network for banjo lovers - all this from a man who passes his time with Steve Martin:

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How High The Moon by Les Paul & Mary Ford Listen on Posterous

The first Les Paul song I ever heard was "How High the Moon" on the soundtrack to My Favorite Year.  For years, I assumed Mary Ford's stack of 12 vocal tracks was the Andrews Sisters, and that Les was an entire small combo.  I always loved the song, and I was thrilled (and a little embarrassed) to finally discover after his passing that it was only him and Mary playing around with the multi-track recording methods that he invented.  Who knew?

There's a lot of excellent footage of the then-married couple playing together on variety shows - see one of my favorites below, where Mary really shines:

An amazing, amazing guy - I could listen to that intersection of jazz, rockabilly and country all day, and the modern era of recording might very well not exist without his innovations.

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Beloved children's books!  Beloved children's cartoons!  Oh boy!  October is going to be a quite a month.  First, Where the Wild Things Are finally comes out on October 16th:

There's even an excerpt of Dave Eggers' Where the Wild Things Are screenplay / novelization available courtesy of The New Yorker.

On Oct. 27th, we get a tribute to Harry Nilsson's The Point!, one of my all-time favorite records and movies.  Featuring covers from Devotchka, Martha Wainwright, Andrew Bird and more, you can stream the songs here: 
http://amanorecordings.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-the-point

The record benefits Eggers' 826NYC, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting literacy and writing skills to kids in NYC and beyond.

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See more at FilmDrunk

Visit http://myothercentaur.blogspot.com for more content! Subscribe in a feed reader or by e-mail!

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You can also reply to other users (@UserName), send a private Direct Message (D UserName) or start and follow topics (check out #ModernFairy and #LitDish -- both awesome).

At first glance it seems like just another place for personal updates that no one cares about, but if you use it to announce things other than "I am eating a baloney sandwich - ACK!", it's a really powerful (and mobile) real-time marketing device. It attracts tens of thousands of new users each month, and it has grown more than 600% in the last 12 months.
Read "Twitter - the next big source of blog traffic" for more about setting up an account.

Why Musicians Need Twitter:

1. Your fans are already on Twitter
...and so are the journalists and bloggers who review your albums. Trust me, you'll be surprised by how many people you know on here. A simple search using TwitterSearch will also show you all the tweets containing your name - a great place to start adding followers who are already interested your music.

(You should already be receiving automatic updates from Google whenever your name is dropped in news, blogs, videos or other groups - if not, set them up at Google Alerts)

2. Twitter works with your cell phone
Let's say you just finished your sound check and no one has shown up for a gig. Simply send a tweet via text to 40404, and Twitter can notify all your followers that they are missing the best show of your career! Better yet, if they have your profile set up for notifications, it will send an alert to their cell phone.

If you're a touring musician or stuck in the studio, Twitter is a great way to get around spotty Internet access and a lack of time to update your website. Simply text updates from the road and have them fed into your other online profiles.

Services like TwitPic are also great for instantly uploading photos from the road, right from your phone. That burrito you ate with Lyle Lovett? Show everyone in just a few minutes!

3. Twitter integrates with your other social networking services
You can set Twitter to automatically change your Facebook status to your latest tweet, or use a service like TwitterFeed and allow Twitter to automatically tweet your latest blog post, Flickr upload, show calendar update and more.

When I publish this post, Twitter will automatically create a tweet entitled "Twitter for Musicians Pt 1" with a link to this blog (check it out here). At the same time, Twitter will change my Facebook status to the title of that tweet. My Twitter account also imports my latest GoodReads updates, Blip.fm updates and my shared Google Reader items - it saves me tons of time, and it makes sure that my friends who are on Twitter but not Facebook / mailing lists / near a computer can get the same info as everyone else in real time.

-----------------------------------------------
Still not sold? Just take my word for it, set up an account, check out the articles below, and Part II will go into much more detail about integrating Twitter with your other online marketing outlets. And follow me on Twitter when you get there!

• How To Use Twitter for Music Promotion

• Twitter For Musicians and Bands: A How-To Guide

• Musicians’ Guide to Rocking Twitter
  

Visit http://myothercentaur.blogspot.com for more content! Subscribe in a feed reader or by e-mail!

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