• You know when you mishear a song lyric and think something completely different is being said? There’s a word for that. Mondegreen.
• This pretty much explains itself: a hat with a cloth beard and mustache attached. Looks warm – I couldn’t wear it though.
• Ridiculous mockups made for Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid. Yeah right they are going to fit the Olympics into the park.

A clip of drummer Joe Morello playing with the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1964.

Pianolina is a neat little flash app that uses collisions to create sounds. It’s difficult to create anything remotely listenable, but it’s still fun to watch the boxes hit the walls and each other to create notes. Drag some of the colored squares into the main field give them a little toss to create sounds. The creator has pre-programmed some approximations of notable lines of music (see: Beethoven, Satie, etc.) that are fun to watch and listen to as they fall apart.

• Tweed Run was an organized bike outing in London where everyone dressed up in their tweed and browns. The pictures from Flickr look like a lot of fun.
• There was a time capsule of early audio recordings buried under the Opera House in Paris in 1907, with orders to open it a hundred years. This New York Times article tells the fascinating story.
• Here is a list of all the beautiful adjectival words for colors. Use them in your next novel! Some of my favorites: greige, cinerious, purpureal.

The Dillards were a fantastic bluegrass band that crossed over into pop in the 1960s. Doug Dillard, the banjo player for the band, later joined up with Gene Clark of the Byrds to form Dillard & Clark. But make no mistake-the Dillards were not the Byrds. If the Byrds were 1/4th country, then the Dillards supplied the other 3/4ths. Look at the picture-they were the real deal.

That makes it almost incongruous to highlight the Dillards with one of their poppiest covers. However, the Beatles song “I’ve Just Seen a Face” is one of the Beatles’ most country-influenced songs (that chorus!). To hear a full country cover of it is very satisfying and makes it even clearer what a great, simple song it is.

The Dillards – I’ve Just Seen a Face

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

To offset this pop cover, I’ve included the Dillards cover of the Irish ballad “Polly Vaughn.” Many musicians have played versions of this song (including Bob Dylan), but the Dillards make it their own.

The Dillards – Polly Vaughn

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

My second iGoogle theme, Blue Wallpaper, went up last week. This one is static and uses only one image, unlike my first theme, Old London, which has a rotating set of pictures.

It’s based on a dark, damask-like wallpaper pattern. I was going for elegance without making it look funereal. If you want to use it, you can add it here.

• It’s amazing how many pieces of “classical music” are a part of our culture. The website Kickass Classical lists one hundred of the most popular and most recognizable pieces. Some of the names and composers are unfamiliar to me, but I recognize the piece instantly. Mostly from movies and cartoons I guess.
• The EURion Constellation is the unofficial name for a security pattern that appears on many of the world’s currencies. It’s a precise arrangement of five dots. There is no official documentation about it, since it’s an anti-counterfeit security measure. Some guess that it is the reason that many color copiers will not let you copy money (but that could be another system called Digimarc).
• Have you ever seen anything stranger than a wet koala?

The Brian Jonestown Massacre are heading out on their first US tour in 3 years in March. I’ve already got tickets for the Chicago show at the Metro on March 28. Bring it!
(Who knows if anyone pictured above will be there. Hopefully the good Doctor, at least.)

I recently designed a theme for iGoogle, Google’s customizable homepage. It’s called Old London, and it features vintage photographs of London with brown and gray widget boxes. If you use iGoogle, you can add it here.

The theme uses three different vintage images which appear at different times during the day. Designing themes for iGoogle is dead simple. You send them a single XML file with all of the theme information in it. If anyone wants it for reference, you can see the one I created for Old London here. Google says 424 people are using the theme, which is cool.

It was a quick process, and I hope to do another one sometime soon. Any suggestions?

The likeness is uncanny. I don’t know that I’d want to eat hair frosting though… From Alliance Bakery, Chicago.