When I Stop Dreaming

The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture site is a new blog that features great news photography at a greater size than normally found online. The photos are amazing — and the size adds a level of intensity to stories I wouldn’t have thought of as dramatic, such as Korean protests against American beef. Seriously. This photo gallery on the Cassini spacecraft’s journey past Saturn is beyond words.

Here’s the famous William Shatner performance at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards, which was nicely parodied on Family Guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvQwXOCKNLY That’s what living in the ’70s was like, kids.

The New Yorker’s online edition has a fascinating article that combines everything you might want to know about elevators (“The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days.” I did not know that!) with the frightening story of Nicholas White, who in 1999 was working in Manhattan’s McGraw-Hill Building and returning from a smoke break, when his express elevator stopped a third of the way up, in a section that had no outlet for many floors in either direction. Oh yeah, and it was …

Will Rigby, drummer for the DBs, writes a post on Ted Barron’s always-entertaining Boogie Woogie Flu blog about a road trip to Memphis, hanging out with Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, and a visit to an abandoned Sun Studios. There are oral histories of rock, like Please Kill Me and Jim Walsh’s book on the Replacements, All Over But The Shouting, and I bet there’s a history of Big Star waiting to be told. Rigby’s recollection includes meeting a very depressed Bell, who was managing a family restaurant prior to recording I Am The Cosmos, not long before his death. …