I am currently having a passionate love affair with The Cat Empire. By some cruel twist of fate they were at the ANU just last week, and I somehow missed them. I think they capture something truly wonderful and timeless about Melbourne (and it takes a lot to admit this as a proud Sydneysider). The perfect mix of a vibrant buzz of multicultural musical influences and a cheeky Australian smirk that just makes you want to kick your feet up and have a beer and a dance with your mates in the summer sun.
This song perhaps isn’t the best example of the above description, its a little bit grittier than most of their stuff, but it’s a truly brilliant piece of music.
Mother Tongues
This is a very interesting article about the way language can shape the way you think. I have been fascinated by this idea since my somewhat rudimentary and half hearted attempt last year to learn Spanish. I was continually enthralled by conceptual quirks of the language, like the fact that the verb ‘to hope’ in Spanish (‘esperar’) is the same as the verb ‘to wait’. My mind would wonder during grammar lessons, to ponder the poetry of the idea that perhaps for Spanish speakers, ‘to wait’ is on some deep level ‘to hope’, and vice versa. I also love that Spanish has two verbs for ‘to be’ - one is essential, the other qualitative or temporal - that is, you can be happy as in a fundamentally positive person, or you can be happy, as in you are in a happy mood at a particular point in time. It seems to me that this gives Spanish speakers a more passionate, more direct and more articulate way of expressing characteristics than we can in English. Anyway, my amateur musings are explored far more eloquently in the aforementioned article.
I feel I should post something dramatic and opinionated about the recent federal election, and it’s historic and exciting results, but to be honest, I feel so disenfranchised and uninspired by the state of the government that I have instead decided to post this picture of a busker outside the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Peaceful, engrossed in his art, pre-occupied by technique and lost in the music, he’s somewhere else …
Yo-Yo Ma jammin to Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello No.1 in G Major. Out of this world.
The agnostic cartographer.
This is a really interesting article about the way Google Earth represents the modern age of digital, democratic, community based cartography, and what this means for traditional authority in geo-politcs. If perhaps a little esoteric, it certainly paints a bigger picture about what the forum of the internet means for the future of human knowledge and authority.
Spices at the Mercado de San Jeronimo on the outskirts of Cusco, Peru. I think the best way to experience a new city is to spend a day at the local fresh produce markets. The smells, colours, tastes and sounds are overwhelming.
Elephants
Everything you think you understand about the animal kingdom will be blown away by this extraordinarily moving video.
