The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Meetings all day

All of these articles look interesting, and I hope I get to read them:

Oh, fun! Another meeting!

Understanding music graphically

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra has created brilliant listening guides for audiences:

Hannah Chan-Hartley is the managing editor and musicologist at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO). She oversees the production of the orchestra’s various printed programmes, from designing layouts and writing and editing content, to the creation of its intriguing ‘listening guides’ with graphic designer Gareth Fowler.

A deft mix of text and graphics, the guides can be read while listening to the performance, their layout visualising the thematic progression of the music, indicating the keys in use, what instruments feature and, using morse code-like notation, their duration.

Check out the graphics themselves on the Creative Review or percussionist Chester Englander's Twitter feed.

That said, since childhood I've really enjoyed Peter Schickele's approach:

The Holy Bible (abridged)

Zach Weinersmith has abridged the Bible "Beyond the Point of Usefulness." And he has given this work a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC license, which lets me post it right here for you (281 k, PDF). Enjoy.

Excerpts:

Genesis: God made everything, but humans keep screwing it up; some Jews move to Egypt, which seemed like a good idea at the time.

Amos: Amos becomes, like, the 14,000th prophet to note that Israel is making God mad and when you make God mad things go bad.

Acts: Finding the market for Jewish converts to be quite limited, the apostles branch out to gentiles. In the process, Steve gets killed, but it’s okay because it gets Paul to convert. Paul does a great job, until the Romans get mad.

Seriously, download the book and you'll have read the entire Bible in 15 minutes.