An unlikely result of organizing the all-day shape note sing at the Depreciation Lands Museum: my discovery of this old novelty hit and, more happily, the amazing Slim Gaillard:

 And what does this have to do with shape-note singing? The day before the sing I happened to call the museum office to check on a detail, and the nice woman there informed me that there would be a cement mixer running in the parking lot in front of the church we'd be singing in. In the end this didn't happen (thanks, Karen!) but…

Thanks to Joel Kennedy, I've been learning the original melody (tricky!) to Moondog's amazing canon "Nero's Expedition". I had long wondered about the Sud of Nubia. I suspected Moondog of erudition rather than fantasy here. Being in a time-wasting mood today, I did some searching around and found this from a scanned-in-as-image report of the Crocodile Specialist Group Steering Committee Minutes, 1993, Darwin, Australia (the rather attractive crocodile drawing is from the report):

Proposal for a Crocodile

Cole Thompson makes lovely black and white photographs. Since I’m mystically attracted to trees, I’m including some thumbnails of his tree photos, but if you like them you should go look at his whole site.

He also has a blog where he writes many interesting and useful things about creating art, for instance:

I recently taught a workshop on Vision and was discussing my practice of Photographic Celibacy. I explained that the reason I do not look at other photographer’s work is that I don’t want my Vision to…

Jane Freeman paints, among other things, illustrations for classic novels.

A novel may work on us like a lucid dream.  Awake, but not in control of events, we take in images, words, symbols, ideas, feelings, without pausing to master them--and they work their way in our interior world, pressing secret latches and opening previously unsuspected doors.

One pleasure of childhood I’ve always been sorry to leave behind is the illustrated story. Like Jane Eyre, in adult books I saw “no bright variety … spread…