bits/bytes/birds/bags

I don't know much about the electronic musics, but I'm enjoying this guy's crazy sounds (scroll down for player).

One of the most amazing things I've learned recently:
Many of the nests for bird's nest soup are "produced" in "factories".

One of the other most amazing things I've learned recently:
David Allan Coe cut a record with Dimebag Darrell?!?!?

Learn English The Malkmus Way

I never really got into Pavement, so I've been pretty immune to the excitement generated by their reunion, but it does give me an excuse to share my one and only Pavement-related anecdote, which takes place in Beijing a few years ago.  My Chinese friend, who was driving me to the airport, had the radio tuned to a station that played English language lessons.  The lesson that was playing as I arrived at the terminal, and that made me wish I didn't have to get out of the car, was using as its text the lyrics to Pavement's "Cut Your Hair".  So, Pavement fans can take pride in the fact that potentially millions of people in China have been learning English via Steve Malkmus lyrics.

Fantastic Voyage of the Astroworms

 I found this amazing sentence sitting inconspicuously near the end of a news story about Iran's nuclear program:

"In a separate development, Iran said it had successfully launched a rocket carrying a mouse, turtle and worms into space for research purposes."

 And then this:

"The launch of the Kavoshgar-3 – which means Explorer-3 in Farsi – came after Iranian state television broadcast images of officials putting the creatures inside a capsule before the rocket took off."

I want to see these images.

A Trivial Revelation

In my recent post about Nabokov's Stories, I don't think I made reference to VN's penchant for big words.  I had to look up quite a few of them, and in the process learned the following piece of information:

The word decal is short for decalcomania.

How could I not have known that a word I've heard all my life is just a shortened form of a much longer, much stranger word?  Decalcomania.  Just look at it.

Bonus Links
I just discovered this.  And even better, this.

Death On (and Adjacent To) the Diamond

This Slate article is full of very strange facts taken from what must be a very strange book about a very strange subject, death in baseball. I'll never be able to think of Manny Mota the same way again. Seriously.