Hoover Loves Lucy

Here's a fan letter to Lucille Ball, sent in 1955 by J. Edgar Hoover.

Th Cat Piano

The cat piano was the work of a German scholar over 350 years ago. Athanasius Kircher designed the cat piano and documented it in the Musurgia Universalis in 1650. The piano was designed to raise the spirits of an Italian prince who suffered from stress. The musician would select cats whose voices were at different pitches then arrange them in the pens accordingly. The piano delivered sharp pokes into the tails of the cats.

The cat piano confirms Darnton's discovery that most early modern Europeans found the torture of cats funny. It also illustrates Kircher's fascination with the relationship between the art of music and the natural production of animal sounds. But for us it is an instrument that has mercifully been forgotten.

Although... I wonder if there are any blueprints.

Pandora.com Radio

Pandora is an online radio station from the people that bought you the Music Genome Project. It asks you what you like, and takes it from there.

And it’s extremely easy. All it does is ask you the name of one band you like. I typed “Sex Pistols”, and hit enter. It started playing “I'm a Lazy Sod”, then moved on to "Bang Bang" by Iggy Pop, then onto Husker Du, and the UK Subs because of the similarity of the music, and so on.

Couldn’t be simpler and makes for excellent background music. You might even discover some new artists in the process.

I REALLY love this.

When You’re A One-Year-Old Quadruplet...

...everything is funny!

A well deserved FUCK YOU for David Irving

VIENNA, Austria - Right-wing British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison Monday after admitting to an Austrian court that he denied the Holocaust — a crime in the country where Hitler was born. He had pleaded guilty to the charge.

"I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz," he told the court in the Austrian capital.

Irving appeared stunned by the sentence, and told reporters: "I'm very shocked and I'm going to appeal."

Irving's lawyer said he considered the verdict "a little too stringent".

Irving, 67, arrived in the court room handcuffed, wearing a blue suit, and carrying a copy of Hitler's War, one of many books he has written on the Nazis, and which challenges the extent of the Holocaust.

Irving was arrested in Austria in November, on a warrant dating back to 1989, when he gave a speech and interview denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. He was stopped by police on a motorway in southern Austria, where he was visiting to give a lecture to a far-right student fraternity.

In the past, he had claimed that Adolf Hitler knew little, if anything, about the Holocaust, and that the gas chambers were a hoax.

The judge in his 2000 libel trial declared him "an active Holocaust denier... anti-Semitic and racist".

"Of course it's a question of freedom of speech," Irving said. "The law is an ass."

"He is everything but a historian ... He is a dangerous falsifier of history," prosecutor Klackl said, calling Irving's statements an "abuse of freedom of speech."