A worthy bit from The Disadvantages of an Elite Education:

The opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Innocent people should never talk to the police. Take the 5th. Very good advice from a couple of law school lectures. [via waxy]

My fourth muxtape is ready for your aural pleasure.

These photos of a leopard killing a crocodile are amazing. Apparently it's the first time this has been witnessed or recorded.

Some nice visual storytelling by the woman who fought the system in Toronto and unpaved her driveway. Lovely results one year later.

I couldn't make it up if I tried. I saw this tonight. Only about 30 feet separates this from the worst parking I've ever seen incident earlier this year. There must be some sort of psycho-electro-magnetic field in this parking lot that disrupts human motor functions.

Simply Noise generates white noise and pink noise. I was surprised by how nice it is.

We often buy “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” despite its awful name and soul-withering chemical composition. Even the product’s faux-entertaining site refers to it as a “nutritious blend of oils.”... In fact, we just bought the “light” version of it, which is therefore some sort of simulacrum of the original.

There's some great naming suggestions in the comments.

Medical students who study art develop better observation skills and make better diagnoses.

I've been flipping through The Collected Prose of Robert Frost and came across this marvelous bit:

No one given to looking under-ground in spring can have failed to notice how a bean starts its growth from the seed. Now the manner of a poet's germination is less like that of a bean in the ground than of a waterspout at sea. He has to begin as a cloud of all the other poets he ever read. That can't be helped. And first the cloud reaches down toward the water from above and then the water reaches up toward the cloud from below and finally cloud and water join together to roll as one pillar between heaven and earth. The base of water he picks up from below is of course all the life he ever lived outside of books.

Frost speaks elsewhere of "the person who writes out of the eddy in his mind." Great images.

As an aside, not only is this a really great metaphor, but it also strikes me as a killer opening paragraph. It starts with a kind of odd idea, but not too uncomfortable (I mean, I know what a bean is, but I haven't looked at one in the ground in decades). Then the contrast of beans with what he really wants to talk about, poets. And waterspouts. What? Then a couple short prep sentences. Then the rolling polysyndetonic waterspout of a sentence to flesh out the metaphor and to be a sort of pillar in itself connecting the odd ideas at the opening with real-world experience down at the bottom of the paragraph. The language here mirrors the concepts in a very cool way.

Going shampoo-free sounds kind of cool.

Garr Reynolds talking about presentation design & delivery.

I stumbled on a video of Glen Velez playing a frame drum. I saw him in a workshop a while back when I was in college. Insane skills. We also did some overtone singing, but one of the coolest things I remember was him improvising a little solo with shakers, with all kinds of mind-bending polyrhythms.

This week's installment at mlarson.muxtape.com.

How to be a snob when drinking alcohol: "There are guidelines. First, if you're faking it, everything is faint---you want to talk in terms of hints, notes, and shades. Give the impression that you only barely caught this delicate wisp of a flavor because you were concentrating so intensely back in Step 2."

A picture of the Jefferson Bible. This is the kind of awesome thing that people did before electricity/tv/internet (Jefferson Bible on Wikipedia). The last chapter in the Jefferson version has such a great ending.

When you are outside drawing a tree, YOU are choosing what is in focus, what is not---there is an exchange between subject and viewer. That is the art. To be present in that moment.

[thanks, austin]

Some are saying Halo Kid is the new Star Wars Kid (already some remixes out there). What I find so fun and lovable about these videos isn't the mocking, but just seeing someone so completely, enthusiastically lost in their own creativity and imagination. Give Halo Kid's cardboard weapons a look (they've even got working reload functions). What a treat.

Andr?°s Schiff did an 8-part series of lectures on all of Beethoven's piano sonatas.

My second muxtape in an ongoing series of indeterminate length. Some static hiss on the last track, but it's a hot performance.