My sister, Darien, has long been a musical theater dynamo, but now she is starting to work professionally as an actor. When you go to auditions, having a personal website is near an expectation these days. At its simplest, a site is a place to provide a resumé and headshots, but it can also be more than that—one might find clips and reel footage, review excerpts, blog-style professional updates, and, hopefully, even learn something of the person through the site design itself.

I built a site for her with these things in mind. After an unscientific survey of the many WYSIWYG portfolios and flash monstrosities out there, I had a shortlist of what I wanted for a clean, modern site: styled web fonts, lightbox-like gallery functionality, mobile device friendly, no flash or surprise PDF links, and a flexible news section that she or others can update. The site is built using WordPress, and, while there are still a few finishing touches to put on, it is ready to go—which is a good thing, since she’s already sharing the web address on business cards!

Diego Stocco:

Almost everyday, on my way to a local bakery, I walk in front of a dry cleaners. When they have the front door open, I hear a lot of interesting sounds coming from their work equipment. Eventually, the different mechanical and steam sounds sparked something in my mind, so one day I asked the owners if I could record a piece of music by using their machines as musical instruments.

I used a puff iron, press and dry cleaning machines, a washer, clothes hangers, and a bucket full of soap. The bass and lead sounds were created from the buzzing tones coming from the conduits and engines. There are no additional sounds from any traditional or electronic instruments.

• The Frustrated Little Shopkeeper: a clever, bilingual little girl deals with her parents’ increasingly ridiculous requests while switching roles and languages.
• From the Extras special features, a short on the spiraling difficulties of laughing during a scene (“corpsing” in the biz). Worth it to see Ian McKellen bust up.
• Wikipedia’s list of Unusual Deaths—which helpfully notes that it may never be complete.

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 automated guitar can play in ways impossible for a two-handed, ten-fingered human. The folks at RagtimeWest build automated instruments and even entire automated bands. The results are fascinating and eerily soulless. A couple more guitar tracks:

• Hey Jude
• Brown Eyed Girl
• Dust in the Wind
• Billie Jean (a duet)

The same group built some musicbots for Pat Metheny’s project Orchestrion.