Category: General

E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons Dies at 69

 

E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons Dies at 69:

Clemons – known affectionately to fan and friends as the Big Man – was the heart and soul of the E Street Band. His playing on tracks like “Born To Run,” “Thunder Road,” “Jungleland,” “Dancing In The Dark” and countless more represent some of the most famous sax work in the history of rock & roll. “The story I have told throughout my work life I could not have told as well without Clarence,” Springsteen wrote in the introduction to Clemons’ 2009 memoir Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales.

Born to Run was such a seminal part of my childhood, listening to the record brings vivid memories of listening to Thunder Road on a tape deck in a busted old Volkswagon Rabbit puttering throughout the two lane roads of rural Ohio. Eventhough we would speed past She’s the One and Meeting Across the River, the sound of the Big Man’s sax would flow through the two working speakers, making the drive monumental.

He will be missed.

In Tennessee, Fireflies Are Beacon for Tourists

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In Tennessee, Fireflies Are Beacon for Tourists:

The secret is out about this marvelously rare and very brief annual spectacle. About a thousand tourists a night come to Elkmont, a small trailhead in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, during the two weeks each June when the country’s largest population of synchronous fireflies puts on what locals call “the light show.”

That is not exactly true, but the finer details of Photinus carolinus remain mysterious. The synchrony is more a race than a drum beat. One dominant male blinks and then all of the others flash almost instantly too. They follow a pattern, Morse-code-like, of roughly six seconds of flashing and then six seconds of darkness that lasts for about two hours after dusk.

An open letter to Twitter on The @towerbridge Affair

What Adam said:

The first important recognition inscribed in @towerbridge is that we can reconceive of the built environment as a field of available informational resources. The second is that this can be done very simply, and at surprisingly little cost — crucial, when the established technology vendors are heavily invested, and want to invest others, in heroic “smart city” infrastructure.

Tom’s third insight, though, is even more foundational than either of these two. It’s that urban actors like bridges might speak to people on the same terms, and in the same voice, as we use amongst ourselves. Simply, respectfully, usefully…and without any of the obfuscation and mystery that’s, let’s face it, inherent for most people in terms like “networked urban object” and “common messaging bus.” In this sense, @towerbridge as Tom used it clearly established best practice in my field.