A video clip of African/Cherokee-American jazz bagpiper Rufus Harley (1936-2006) playing at the Theatre of the Living Arts in his hometown of Philadelphia in 2004.

I just caught the last 20 minutes or so of a documentary about this cat on PBS last night and I looked him up on YouTube. According to Wikipedia, he was "known primarily as the first jazz musician to adopt the Scottish great Highland bagpipe as his primary instrument." The documentary is called "Pipes of Peace" and I'm all set up to record it next time it's on PBS.

New research shows that it may have been a Frenchman, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, rather than the American Edison, who is the first to have recorded sound, some 17 years before the great inventor's patent on his phonograph. David Giovannoni led a team of American researchers who have dug up the recordings and managed to reproduce the sound they recorded. Interestingly, the sounds were recorded in a visual form, rather than a mechanical form. They were never necessarily meant to be replayed, but computer technology has made it possible to retrieve the sounds originally etched in visual form on paper. You can hear the recording and read all about it here.

Make sure you've got 10 minutes to really watch this, and another 10 at least to digest it. It's a lot to think about.

Read about the dolphin saving the two whales here
or watch the video here.

These types of photos exist because Eastern Europeans have a nose for humor in its infinite variations: http://sneezl.com/only-in-russia/

When I sent them to Heidi Brown (see Russia I), she wrote: "I absolutely adore these photos. They’re indescribably Eastern European. Thanks for the giggle!"


Giggle, indeed!–But no doubt those Russians are plotting this very minute to catch us out the very same way... If you see a camera pointed your way, smile, it could be you. :]

Click here to catch a news interview segment where my cousin, Heidi Brown, who works for Forbes Magazine, is interviewed on Russian television about her view of Russia's image in the West. The interview is in English.

Well, folks, here they are -- the only two videos of Lonnie Johnson that I could find on all of youtube:





It's kind of incredible to me that someone I consider to be one of the greatest -- and I mean greatest -- guitarists of the 20th Century only appears twice on video. Enjoy!