• The Tribune on the latest in the ongoing saga to save the Uptown Theatre. The short of it: no money and no change yet, but more talk is something, right?
• A concept car from 1938: the Phantom Corsair. More info from wikipedia. I still like it, even after JV said it looks like it belonged to Batman Hitler.
• Dependable ol’ Wilco did a nice set at NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series last weekend.

• An amazing WWII story about Niels Bohr having to dissolve gold Nobel prize medals. Science wins out in the end.
• Studs Terkel talks about radio, his own life and his work process in this interview from 2001. Text and audio available.
• The Scottish Verdict: in the courts of Scotland a criminal verdict can go one of three ways: “proven”, “not proven”, or “not guilty”. Why is a matter of some interesting history.

Apollo 1 crew during water egress training, June 1966. Embiggen.

I love how perfectly this photo captures the transition from atomic age to space age. All that’s missing is some TV dinners. Tragically all three astronauts pictured died in the Apollo 1 test launch fire six months later.

• This American Life has been on a roll lately, and their recent episode with the Plant Money folks covering patents may be the best of the bunch. It focuses on warchests of software patents and subsequent litigation.
• F1 race car driver Karun Chandhok shares his steering wheel and explains what all the buttons do. I can’t believe they are expected to do all this at 200mph, but I suppose there are rules about not giving the driver assistance and turning the cars into giant remote-controlled vehicles.
• Music news: You can watch Radiohead remix/refine their last album on Nigel Godrich’s own From the Basement series. Also, The Weeknd released a new mixtape, which is up for grabs here.
• Music not-so-news: Karlheinz Stockausen, composer and electronic music pioneer, gave a lecture in 1972 on (among other things) sound synthesis. It came at an interesting time, as electronic synthesizers were making the jump from laboratories to recording studios.

Chasing a heavier sound, Lou Reed tuned all six of his guitar strings to D for a pre-Velvets party song called The Ostrich. The Ostrich guitar was born and its peculiar drone was later used to great effect on tracks like Venus in Furs.

• New camera technology is coming that allows photographers to change the focus of a photo after the snap. The data captured by the “micro-lens array” puts a simple two-lens 3D shot to shame.
• With some old documents and a little urban archaeology Forgotten Chicago maps out the evolution of Chicago’s El system, exploring its many abandoned and demolished lines.
• Hats. All of ‘em. Thanks, Wikipedia.

• Jack Endino, record producer, published a worthwhile article in Tape Op on the nuances of guitar tuning called Guitar Tuning Nightmares Explained.
• How many different versions of St. James Infirmary will it take to rid the blues? A hundred? Let her go, Let her go, God bless her!
• The new Buddy Holly tribute album is streaming on Soundcloud (and NPR) with tracks from the Black Keys, Fiona Apple, Cee Lo, Justin Townes Earle and others. Want to feel like a layabout? Guess how old Buddy was when he died.

• From the depths of Michigan State’s college of arts and letters website, there’s an archive of literary talks by some real writer-celebrities: Atwood, Irving, McCullough, Sontag, Updike, Vonnegut, and a bunch more. The files are in .rm format, but VLC comes to the rescue.
• Speaking of literature, here’s a bummer of a Wikipedia list: book burning incidents throughout history.
• George Harrison spent some time at Dylan’s place at the end of 1968 and came home with an early copy of the Basement Tapes. The Beatles never recorded a proper take of it, but they did a few off-the-cuff recordings of “I Shall Be Released” the next month at the Get Back sessions. Elvis did his own little take in ’71.

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks – Ilya Repin (1880)

Set in 1676, this painting depicts the scrappy Cossacks writing a legendary reply to a demand for submission by the Sultan of the Ottoman empire. Their vulgar letter is the stuff of myth (it circulated like a 17th century meme), but no one seems to put it past the Zaporozhians to have really sent it. Read the full correspondence on Wikipedia.

How Charlie Christian joined Benny Goodman’s band:

The encounter that afternoon at the recording studio had not gone well. Charles recalled in a 1940 Metronome magazine article, “I guess neither one of us liked what I played”, but Hammond decided to try again—without consulting Goodman, he installed Christian on the bandstand for that night’s set at the Victor Hugo restaurant in Los Angeles. Displeased at the surprise, Goodman called “Rose Room“, a tune he assumed that Christian would be unfamiliar with. Unknown to Goodman, Charles had been reared on the tune, and he came in with his solo—which was to be the first of about twenty, all of them different, all unlike anything Goodman had heard before. That version of “Rose Room” lasted forty minutes; by its end, Christian was in the band. In the course of a few days, Christian went from making $2.50 a night to making $150 a week.