Listen up! Kinshasa paraplegic-street-gang-with-homemade-bikes-and-guitars Staff Benda Bilili‘s album Très Très Fort is now out on Crammed. Run for your life and pick up a copy!
Staff Benda Bilili
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Monthly Archives: March 2009
Potsmaster
While doing a little research for the radio-amateurs-in-Ethiopia book, I was blindsided by my next two books:
Sir Francis Walsingham ran a postal interception bureau with some cryptanalytic capability during the reign of Elizabeth I, but the technology was only slightly less advanced than men with shotguns, during World War I, who jammed pigeon post communications and intercepted the messages carried.
—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGINT_in_Modern_History
Image CC-BY-NC-SA by hugovk
Carving
My longboards have been gathering dust all winter.
+M1 is at ice-skating camp.
+Rachel and M2 are swimming.
+The ice is off the roads.
= An afternoon of soul-carving down the long slow hill in front of our house.
It’s spring!
Image CC-BY by AMagill
Portal
This passage describing pre-Napoleonic Cairo, from Geoff Manaugh’s review of Nina Burleigh’s book Mirage grabs me by the subconscious:
You knock two or three times — and then crawl through a small circular door in the middle of a brick wall that could just as easily have been the entrance to a building. And then you’re gone, hiking through a part of the city you’d never even heard of before.
I just can’t get enough of neighborhoods divided from one another by hobbit-doors. I’ll be spending a LOT of time in Imaginary Cairo for the foreseeable future.
Image CC-BY-NC by docman