A member of Brian Wilson’s band speaks:
“When my friends hear I’m touring with the Beach Boys, they’re like, ‘Oh, so you’re doing fairgrounds and stuff?’” he says. “And I’m like, ‘No, we’re with Brian Wilson.’ But, you know, when we performed Pet Sounds and Smile, that was art. That was Brian. Now we are kind of at the fairgrounds.”From Andrew Romano’s long report on the Beach Boys’ summer reunion tour: The Beach Boys’ Crazy Summer (Newsweek).
The New York Times reports on a reunion of Misses Rheingold (or Miss Rheingolds). The reunion took place in conjunction with a New-York Historical Society exhibit on beer in New York City: Beer Here: Brewing New York’s History.
For New Yorkers of a certain age, Rheingold is synonymous with beer. I knew the jingle, or one version of it, as a child:
My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer.Here is a ninety-three-year-old woman singing another version of the lyrics. And here is a commercial with a third version.
Ask for Rheingold whenever you buy beer.
It’s refreshing, not sweet;
It’s the extra-dry treat.
Won’t you try extra-dry Rheingold beer?
InstaCRT is an iPhone app that projects a photograph onto a CRT (cathode ray tube) in Sweden and returns a photograph of the resulting image. That’s nice.
What interests me more though is the music in the app’s demo video. “What is that music?” I asked myself. And a voice replied, “It’s a slowed-down loop of the first four bars of ‘The Brown-Skin Gal in the Calico Gown,’ by Duke Ellington and Paul Francis Webster.” Here is the 1941 Ellington recording, with Herb Jeffries singing.
Fraser Speirs demolishes a mistaken bit of iPad folklore about apps in the multitasking bar. John Gruber says Speirs is right.
From an NPR underwriting plug for OfficeMax: “offering Forever stamps, like at the post office.”
Like at the post office, like on NPR! The awkward “like at” aside, it makes little sense to tout the stamps sold (not offered) at OfficeMax as the same stamps sold at the post office.
Better: “selling Forever stamps, saving you a trip to the post office.”
[This post is no. 37 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]
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From the Museum of Modern Art: Dial-a-Poem. Keep clicking the blue icon for more selections. Or call 347-POET001 repeatedly.
[The MoMA page may have problems in Chrome.]
