Truth and roses...

Burnt Relief, the duo of Colin Edwin and Jon Durant, have a new album called Etymology due for release soon. You can pre-order at the previous link and listen to the sample track, Precis, here.

If you yawn when you hear the phrase "string quartet" and think dusty old farty music, think again. The Kronos Quartet plays modern, classic, fresh works. If nothing else, watch the video for the visual effects. (See there website at www.kronosquartet.org.)

Callum Innes, Exposed Painting Red Oxide, 2013. "The paintings pretend to be neat and tidy but they're really quite chaotic."

One of my favorite painters, Callum Innes, was a nominee for the 1995 Turner Prize. This year's candidates don't include a single painter - video, photo, and other arts are represented.

"Teaching biology without evolution would be like teaching chemistry without molecules, or physics without mass and energy." A college biology professor has The Talk with his students.

A photo gallery of Betta fish.

For sleepy beer drinkers comes Goodnight Brew, a playful sudsy nighttime tALE.

Another Xmas gift idea for those with $5,000 to spare: a human skull carved from glass scavenged from the Manhattan Project's Hanford site where uranium was enriched. (Note: $5,000 for an object that's around 1.5 inches cubed.)

A blog about Fort Worth: Hometown by Handlebar.

I only recently learned what the word "polymath" means but I would definitely say it applies to this post from Ribbon Farm on flow-pacing as it includes fluid dynamics, music, and software updating among other things.

Cave paintings recently discovered in Indonesia are 40,000 years old and challenge the Euro-centric viewpoint of the development of art.

Pop Chart Lab has something for the architect on your Xmas list: a poster of schematics of structures.

Secret rules for Disney employees? I don't think some of these are all that secret like the fact that characters signing autographs are all trained to do them identically. Not being allowed to say "I don't know" is an interesting one.

Ten really bad opening lines of novels.

Can you tell the difference between a line of Hemingway and a line from a children's book? (I only got 8 of 15 correct.)

Own a piece of sci-fi film history by bidding on original artwork from Star Wars. 

Here are a couple examples of craft pr0n video: making bass guitars and wax food.

The guys from the classic Genesis lineup got together for their new documentary's premiere and were all smiles. But Steve Hackett doesn't like it. And speaking of Genesis, Rolling Stone lists several of their songs that only "hardcore" fans know. I must not be hardcore enough because I'm not sure I'd call some of these "insanely great."

Pink Floyd's new album, The Endless River, is coming in November and here's the trailer and the track Louder Than Words.

Check out the well-being indices where you live.

...have thorns about them. ~Henry David Thoreau