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| Sunday |
the Fifteenth of February, 2004 |
I was vaguely berating digital radio the other week; that the
BBC adverts seem oddly focused on its drawbacks - you have
to make the time to sit down and listen to programmes at home when
they're broadcast, and you can't take your precious wood-and-metal
digital radio out of the house while you walk the dog. MP3 archives
of BBC radio would be nice,
but what would be nicer (particularly in a life
without broadband, or time) is a TiVo-style radio. But it would
target such a vanishingly small demographic that it couldn't possibly
exist.
But it does! And I've now got one, through a serendipitious eBay
auction. The YourWay
Radio Recorder is a fairly basic MP3 player
that lets you record a couple of hours of its internal radio at
32kbps (or four hours at half the quality, or loads more if you
feed it memory chips), and can be set to
record programmes while you're asleep or busy or absent-minded. You
have to be careful about the signal, but I've managed to snare a
good daily hour of Radio Four that I wouldn't have a chance to
listen to otherwise, for spooling back through in the commuting
dead zones.
It's even worth recording a program instead of listening to it, so
that I can skip boring bits and replay the interesting ones. I need
never use a broken
radio again.
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Monopoly is
attacked for not being a realistic model of a capitalist economy.
But Monopoly was invented by
Quakers to illustrate the folly of capitalism and to satirise
exploitative landlords. (The game's claimed origins are contrasted here.)
[via Holly]
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Some wandering around Tate Modern, yesterday - the
Weather
Project turned out to be more striking for its mirrors than anything
else; a good Egyptian afterlife thing, and if you look straight up whilst
walking forward, you get to change your life's camera from
first-person-shooter to rotational overhead view. Until you get a sore
neck.
And I hadn't seen Giuseppe Penone's trees before. No pictures of the
two thirty-foot trunks they had on display, but
Helicoidal Tree gets the
idea across - he strips trunks back to their nth ring layer,
carefully following the knots out into branches to reveal the shape of
the tree as it was in its nth year. I hadn't really thought of
trees as working like this, of containing each of their earlier selves. Massively perspective-changing. Go and see them if you haven't.
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| Wednesday |
the Eleventh |
The hidden leviathan of Urban Chess blinks another eye - someone has
felt-tipped "miss a go" onto a brick in a wall in Brighton.
I'd always seen grids and tiles and office-block windows as generic
Go or chess boards, up until now, but give me a solid paving slab and a long
enough stick of chalk, and I shall change the world.
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