Should you find yourself in Widnes, England today, and if you have forgotten to buy a token of affection for your sugar-pie, you are in luck. You can take your honey-bunch to a lecture on decontamination after an anthrax attack. Say it with antimicrobial pesticides.
The Mudd’s got you covered, anthrax-wise.
It has been said that copious amounts of snow cause a person to, well, not think clearly. See pibloktoq.
Now municipalities in Wisconsin are mixing beet juice in with salt water to de-ice streets. The only catch is, people who wish to have their streets de-iced must run outside and shout, “Beet juice! Beet juice! Beet juice!”
Read about thawing in the Mudd.
Appleton is justly famous for being the childhood home of Houdini and the place where Rocky Bleier honed his gridiron skills. But it is a little known fact that Appleton is a hotbed of confectionaries. In today’s New York Times read about Appleton’s meccas to cream and butter and follow the Candyland trail throughout northeastern Wisconsin.
Wisconsin: It’s Not Just Beer and Bratwurst.
We’re announcing this a day early so you can still catch a last minute super-saver over there. East Anglia Potato Day is tomorrow. Here you can buy your Yorkshire rhubarb crowns (we have no idea,) taste some chips, swap some seeds and hear a talk on “The Commonwealth Potato Collection.” Might this include common-taters? See November 8, 2007.
FYI: The Library of Congress Subject Heading for potatoes is “potatoes.”
We’re all in favor of world-domination by robots, particularly benevolent, Japanese robots. Get a glimpse of the future at Robotopia Rising beginning today at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D. C. Eleven days of robots and robot-related souvenirs await you. There will also be “robot lectures,” which may be lectures by robots or about robots. We aren’t sure. But this is our favorite: a robot “with artificial lips that move with the same finesse as human ones, enabling it to play the trumpet.”
Bach, Beethoven, Brahms? Pffft. In our never-ending quest to provide the newest, the oddest, the anti-top-ten-est music, we present in today’s CD pile some piano works with a warning label, “Doo-dah” on saxophones, art songs by a German composer in English sung by a German guy and music inspired by paintings. The Mudd collection: not for the faint of heart.
If we’ve been asked this question once, we been asked it a thousand times: where can I find sheet music for tunes commonly played in British pubs? We usually answer this query with the reference librarian’s shrug. But now a new source has appeared: A Traditional Music Library. This web site out of the U.K. is a “large traditional and folk music library of songbooks, tune-books, sheet-music, lyrics, midis, tablature, plus music theory, chord diagrams, scales and other music educational & academic reference materials.” It has handy full-text searching capability, too. Impress/bore/frighten your friends at your next gathering with rugby songs, sea chanties and banjo ballads.
Sometimes the planets align in such a way that in the space of a couple of short weeks National Pie Day and the release of an online pirate role-playing game come together in perfect fusion:
Used with the kind permission of the artist, Dan Piraro
On this day in 1987 Liberace went to that great diamond-studded, fur lined Cadillac in the sky. You young folk may not hear the word “flamboyant” much these days, but this gentleman was the textbook definition. Wisconsin claims him as its own since he was born in West Allis and, as you can see, he also did a few years in Sheboygan
On January 16, 1940 the Milwaukee Journal reported on his debut with the Chicago Symphony at Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater. It appears that it took a while to develop his signature style:
“Walter Liberace, a member of the excellent group of young Milwaukee pianists … was heard Monday night at the Pabst as soloist with the Chicago Symphony orchestra. . . .
“Mr. Liberace, a strikingly good looking young man with a most engaging personality, had won the honor of an appearance with the orchestra in a local competition . . . The young artist was at no time in difficulty, but it was apparent that he was proceeding with infinite care, and the swaggering approach that goes so well with Liszt (Liberace had chosen to play Liszt’s Second Concerto in A) was somewhat missed.”
Liberace on LP at the Mudd. And, as you would expect, there is a Liberace Museum in Las Vegas.
Ordinarily we wouldn’t mention the S-Bowl, since we are still very sad about the outcome of last week’s NFC Championship game. But the Hass Avocado Board has come out with a stupefying statistic: they predict a record 53.5 million pounds of avocado will be consumed this Sunday. That’s enough avocados to cover a football field waist-deep. We have to say it: Holy guacamole!
