1. The feud that launched a thousand books — or at least, one sports book that ranks among my favorites — is finally over.
The Adidas-Puma feud
Adidas and Puma kiss play a football match and make up today.
2. Back in the day, it was the ‘want-ad killer’ Harvey Louis Carigan whose killing spree provided Ann
The Harvey Carigan story
Rule with the material for one of her early true-crime stories. Different era, different writer: Maureen Orth, in The Atlantic, on the Craigslist Killer — a story of crime, played out against the backdrop of the internet and its hidden dangers. Also in the same magazine, a Robert Kaplan love letter to Al Jazeera.
3. Update on previous post: Huntsville, Alabama defense contractor Cathy Maples will pony up $63,000 bucks for dinner with Todd and Sarah Palin. It takes all kinds — and some kinds take a lot of money.
4. Bride wanted for world’s tallest man. Must have head for heights.
5. New York bridal shop adds incest to injury.
6. Here’s how you can prevent fatigue and conserve body heat: stand on one leg.
7. Top marks in the recycling stakes goes to this building — made entirely of CD jewel cases.
8. A study on how, and why, music alters our perceptions of others.
But music does emanate from our alarm clocks in the morning, and fill our cars, and give us chills, and make us cry. According to a recent paper by Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya from the University of London, music even affects how we see visual images. In the experiment, 30 subjects were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts. After listening to the snippets, the subjects were shown a photograph of a face. Some people were shown a happy face – the person was smiling – while others were exposed to a sad or neutral facial expression. The participants were then asked to rate the emotional content of the face on a 7-point scale, where 1 mean extremely sad and 7 extremely happy.
The researchers found that music powerfully influenced the emotional ratings of the faces. Happy music made happy faces seem even happier while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown. A similar effect was also observed with neutral faces. The simple moral is that the emotions of music are “cross-modal,” and can easily spread from sensory system to another. Now I never sit down to my wife’s meals without first putting on a jolly Sousa march.
9. Got 57,000 years to spare? Then do this.
10. Political correctness to the max: The Antiblurbs blog examines classic novels through a politically correct lens; the footnotes are totally to die for.
11. Up close and intimate: a William Dalrymple essay on the future of travel writing.
Later, peoples.
Smoke Signals 