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RSVPed Attending 09/10/22 2:00 PM Iona Fyfe Live at Coffee Gallery Backstage

MATINEE! Iona Fyfe is one of the most accomplished young Scottish singers today in the folk tradition and beyond. She won the title of Scots Singer of the Year at the MG ALBA Scots Traditional Music Awards in 2018, Scots Language Awards Speaker of the Year in 2021 and was described as “one of the best Scotland has to offer.” (Global-Music.de). In 2021, she became the first singer to win the coveted title of Musician of the Year at the MG ALBA Scots Trad Music Awards.

Her knowledge and advocacy of the Scots Doric language has recently been extended to issues of equality in the music and other workplaces, winning an award for Equality in the Workplace from the Scottish Musicians Trade Union. Iona not only sings beautiful traditional songs of life, love, and loss in old Scots, but also songs in English written by contemporaries, as well as herself. She has recorded an album of Appalachian songs that go back to her native Aberdeenshire, as well as covers of folks such as Gillian Welch’s “Dark Turn of Mind.” One among many, Mike Harding, of the Mike Harding Folk Show, calls her voice “Absolutely stunning.”

Iona will be accompanied in her show by two of the Pacific Northwest’s finest up and coming young musicians, Alex Sturbaum on guitar and accordion, and Brian Lindsay on fiddle and mandolin. They are the duo Countercurrent, known throughout the contra dance scene nationally for their infectiously rhythmical and joyful performances.

Saturday September 10, 2022 | MATINEE 2:00 PM | $20.00
Reservations: (626) 798-6236


Reservations are strongly suggested. Seating is limited.
Call 626.798.6236 for Reservations Between 10 A - 10 P
Pay by Cash or Check. Sorry … No Credit Cards
No payment necessary when you make telephone reservations. Pay by cash or check at the door at the time of the show.

I’ve been following Iona and her music for a while now and never expected to see her live, much less 5 minutes from my house!! She’s got a few dates in the Los Angeles area this week and upcoming in her US tour, so make your reservations now.

Dw i’n hapus ac yn barod am gerddoriaeth celtaidd wythnos yma.

On hand held objects and material culture

Should we view it as a coincidence or not that the information management carrier of the early 20th century is the same size and scale as the carrier at the opening of the 21st century?

The humble index card and the cellular phone have more in common than we might expect.

Watched We Need to Talk About Cosby, Part I from Netflix
Part 1: Directed by W. Kamau Bell. With Bill Cosby, Gloria Allred, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, Harry Belafonte. In the 1960s Bill Cosby is collecting accolades for his comedy, breaking barriers for Black stunt performers and participating in the nation's sexual liberation and civil rights movement. He also allegedly begins exploiting his power.
Finally popped up on Netflix! 

I hadn’t known about his history of promoting the underrepresented in the stunt space in entertainment. 

I had forgotten about (?) or simply missed (based on my age and exposure) his history with “Spanish Fly”. I don’t recall any of these references during any of the news coverage of his trials or subsequent conviction.

The documentary is very well done and subtle so far, particularly with some snarky/clever images undergirding some of its political position. I appreciate that I’m just a year and change younger than W. Kamau Bell, so I’ve lived in roughly the same time frame he has. I have strong memories of having grown up with Picture Pages, The Electric Company, Fat Albert, et al. I’m curious to see how my experiences are similar and different to Bell’s perspective.

Watched August 29, 2022 - PBS NewsHour full episode from PBS NewsHour
Monday on the NewsHour, the death toll rises and thousands are stranded after monsoons cause catastrophic flooding in Pakistan. Ukrainian forces launch a counteroffensive to retake a strategic southern city from Russian invaders. Plus, Serena Williams competes in what could be her final major tennis tournament. We examine her impact on the sport and her towering legacy.
For those wanting ample margins for active “reading with a pen in hand” are there any publishers that do a great job of wider margins on “classics”/”great books”?
I’m tempted to self-publish custom versions of wide margin or interleaved books.
During the lunch break, I’ve been thinking more about progressive enhancement in the affordances space. Here’s an example of text-based note taking evolving into commonplacing, and from there into a more complex zettelkasten.

Reframing and simplifying the idea of how to keep a Zettelkasten

 

Usually once a tag on my website has more than a couple hundred entries, I convert it into a category. This one was long overdue. This morning I’ve converted the “note taking” tag into a category and moved a bunch of material on commonplace book and zettelkasten traditions over to it. 

If you’ve been following this idea here, it’s time to update your feed.

Read The Quest for a Memex 2022-07-31 by Kevin MarksKevin Marks (kevinmarks.com)
This week John Borthwick put out a call for Tools for Thinking: People want better tools for thinking — ones that take the mass of notes that you have and organize them, that help extend your second brain into a knowledge or interest graph and that enable open sharing and ownership of the “knowl...
I got stuck over the weekend, so I totally missed Kevin Marks’ memex demo at IndieWebCamp’s Create Day, but it is an interesting little UI experiment.

I’ll always maintain that Vannevar Bush really harmed the first few generations of web development by not mentioning the word commonplace book in his conceptualization. Marks heals some of this wound by explicitly tying the idea of memex to that of the zettelkasten however. John Borthwick even mentions the idea of “networked commonplace books”. [I suspect a little birdie may have nudged this perspective as catnip to grab my attention—a ruse which is highly effective.]

Some of Kevin’s conceptualization reminds me a bit of Jerry Michalski’s use of The Brain which provides a specific visual branching of ideas based on the links and their positions on the page: the main idea in the center, parent ideas above it, sibling ideas to the right/left and child ideas below it. I don’t think it’s got the idea of incoming or outgoing links, but having a visual location on the page for incoming links (my own site has incoming ones at the bottom as comments or responses) can be valuable.

I’m also reminded a bit of Kartik Prabhu’s experiments with marginalia and webmention on his website which plays around with these ideas as well as their visual placement on the page in different methods.

MIT MediaLab’s Fold site (details) was also an interesting sort of UI experiment in this space.

It also seems a bit reminiscent of Kevin Mark’s experiments with hovercards in the past as well, which might be an interesting way to do the outgoing links part.

Next up, I’d love to see larger branching visualizations of these sorts of things across multiple sites… Who will show us those “associative trails”?

Another potential framing for what we’re all really doing is building digital versions of Indigenous Australian’s songlines across the web. Perhaps this may help realize Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly’s dream for a “third archive”?

I’m curious if anyone has tried building a digital public zettelkasten on WordPress in general or using using the Slippy plugin in particular?

I’m thinking it may be an interesting experiment, particularly using it in combination with the Webmention plugin to get replies/responses for crosslinking with others’ ideas on the web. This could allow one not only to communicate with other their own slip box, but slip boxes to communicate with each other.

Replied to a thread by Bill Seitz & Tom Critchlow (Twitter)
@BillSeitz @UseCrowdWise @peterhagen_

I get @TomCritchlow’s sentiment, but… the extra “work” it currently entails for the social part dramatically ups the signal to noise ratio for me compared to Twitter.

You’d definitely want the ability to filter by your social circle, especially on popular sites. In fact this sort of discovery mechanism would be cool if it could be more broadly built into either the web or perhaps into IndieWeb social readers which would know your social graph and could surface related details.

Perhaps expanding a browser extension like Crowdwise to include Twitter support might be a potential solution? I would worry that portions wouldn’t add much other than a lot of likes and bookmark-like data. While some[1], [2] might consider Twitter as an annotation layer (not always directly linked) on the web, the overall quality isn’t necessarily going to be built in there.

It would be cool if Crowdwise also added Hypothes.is’ API to their list of sources.

I’m also reminded of Peter Hagen’s experiments with Hypothes.is seem very similar but with a different UI. His version flips the discovery question on its head.

Acquired Card Catalog: 30 Notecards from The Library of Congress (Chronicle Books (via Amazon))
  • SET OF 30 NOTECARDS – Evoking memories of book-filled libraries, the Card Catalog: 30 Notecards from The Library of Congress reproduces the original cards used to keep track of literary classics.
  • HISTORIC DESIGNS – Enclosed in a keepsake cardboard replica card catalog box with tabbed dividers, each card features a different beloved work from the storied collection of the Library of Congress.
  • INCLUDED – This vintage notecard set includes a box tray with slipcase, 30 color cards (30 different designs), 30 envelopes, and 5 tabbed dividers.
  • MAKES AN EXCELLENT GIFT – This gorgeously designed notecard set makes an inspired gift for any writer or fan of The Library of Congress.
You know you might be in deep with the area of tools for thought, note taking, zettelkasten, intellectual history et al., when your loved ones are gifting you card catalog boxes with replica author index cards from the Library of Congress for stationery use for your birthday.

This small box is made of heavy cardboard and is incredibly well done to look like actual dovetailed oak. The replica cards are quite a joy to browse through. I almost don’t want to use them as the stationery they were intended to be.