Tilted Symmetry

I know this sort of music may sound strange to most of us westerners, but I want you to listen to something amazing.

After a few seconds, you'll hear a noise that sounds like some sort of high pitched, dancing flute or whistle. Do you hear that? That is neither a flute or a whistle. The gentlemen on your left is making that sound with the harmonics that are being created as his low, gutteral tones reverberate through his throat and out of his mouth.

I didn't believe this when I first saw it. But then I started searching Youtube for this sort of throat singing, and found some amazing examples that confirmed, for me, that this is truly what is happening. Like This clip for example; this clip doesn't allow me to embed it on my site, but go watch it for yourself. The camera man gets very close to the vocalists mouth, and if you listen closely, you can discern how his low tones produce these strange and amazing harmonics. There are some other examples you can find too.

Discovering these subtle cultural gems in music that is foreign to me really helps me to understand and appreciate it. I'm used to a smoothe beat, soothing guitar, a nice bass...you know, jazz, rock. I never understood how anyone could enjoy this sort of music. But now, I must say, this is absolutely amazing.

I remember my mom telling me what a booger I could be when I was a baby. Once, in a fit of redeeming laughter, she told my wife that a baby boy's main function is to destroy everything you own, and that all you can do is sit and watch this amazing force of destruction make his way into every corner of your material world, and dissect it into bits and pieces. I think she gets a kick out of watching her baby boy fall victim to a baby boy of his own.

For a free application, Linotype FontExplorer X seems to have everything that high-end font management programs like Extensis Suitcase have. I've been using it for a couple of years now, but only on OS X, because it wasn't available for Windows. They've said they were coming out with a Windows version since the day the OS X version came out. I waited and waited, so long that I finally stopped looking for it.

Out of sheer curiosity, I checked again today. Lo and behold, the Windows version is finally available. It's in beta, and I haven't tested it thoroughly yet. But hey, it's free and awesome, so the mere fact that it's available is pretty exciting.

It doesn't matter whether you're an amateur or a professional. If you have enough fonts to merit a management application, FontExplorer X is both simple and versatile, and by far the best free font management application ever.

While I appreciate being thorough and careful when it comes to manipulating important data, my final thought was that there was a lot of extra complication to this backup and restore process without any real gain, and in fact quite a bit of suffering on the timeline and hardware workload.

It's difficult to know who your friends are until you start talking about politics and religion. For me, it's not important that everyone agrees with my philosophies and positions. I'm not looking for agreement (at least not initially or primarily). They can disagree, they can get angry, they can even yell. For me, the question is, where will they be tomorrow, after the discussion has passed?