CoalClock introduced me to The Residents this evening. A group of anonymous, aging musical (and visual) artists who communicate with the press through an anonymous body called the Cryptic Corporation. They already have about sixty albums to their name, as well as a bunch of films. Their wikipedia article is quite informative.
Here are a couple of their short films:
And here is a video of them performing live in Oslo:
Tommy made a nifty new animation, check it out.
Today I met with a professor of mine to discuss my evaluation and he, in an unrelated conversation, asked me where my name comes from (‘Beaton’). I had to tell him the truth: I didn’t really know. I told him that I had read contradicting accounts, that it was French Flemish and that it was Scottish.
After the meeting I looked it up again on the internet. The first search result was an article I hadn’t seen before – probably new – which makes sense of it all:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hconnors/Beaton/BeatonOrigins.html
So it’s a Gaelic name that later adopted and adapted a French Flemish name for use in English speaking contexts…
Wow, amazing. Click the link.
Free Rice is a clever website/wordgame that ingeniously gets you to load up advertisements over and over again, raising money, part of which goes to charity.
It’s fun and I’m learning new words. I learnt that there’s an English cognate for the dutch verb praten (to chat[ter]): prate.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/187
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1683
This is a fascinating article theorizing about how a civilisation like ours might advance over the course of millions of years, and eventually be able to harness the power of the universe…
It also features an explanation of the mysterious monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which I was grateful.
