Mr Curly and the carrot clarinet

Musical instruments made out of vegetables (FT site registration required):

Then there’s my rubber-glove bagpipe, which has gone through a range of transmutations. There are more than 230 types of bagpipe all over the world and people have used all sorts of things for the bag – the Macedonians use a whole goat, while the Scots use stitched leather. The first bagpipes I experimented with were made out of a plastic wine bag. Then I moved on to the rubber glove. The current version uses the glove, an irrigation water pipe and a reed made from a bit of vibrating garbage bag.

Nebenstimme

The title of this post slightly makes me laugh, but yes: Nadia Sirota and her viola!

Postscript on preserves

The OED entry for 'marmalade' is unexpectedly poetic. (That link will only work if you are a Columbia affiliate.) The original marmalade: "a preserve consisting of a sweet, solid, quince jelly resembling chare de quince (see chare n.4) but with the spices replaced by flavourings of rose water and musk or ambergris, and cut into squares for eating"; and the figurative uses are lovely:

1592 G. Harvey New Let. in Wks. (1884) I. 280 Euery Periode of her stile carrieth marmalad and sucket in the mouth.

1607 T. Walkington Optick Glasse 53 The marmalade and sucket of the Muses.

And, on a different note:

1949 J. Steinbeck Russ. Jrnl. 179 A passage of clarinet marmalade played in unmistakable Benny Goodman style.

Bonus links: Orlando (The Marmalade Cat); and this post on The Frisky Housewife, which was the only one of the books we had, very much gives the flavor of it!

Pennies in the slot

The many travails of maintaining the castle. (Courtesy of Carrie, who got it via The Awl.)

"A blank, a question mark"

At the FT, deaf-blind pianist Mark Pampel talks about performance (free site registration required):

Without my hearing aids I wouldn’t even be able to have a conversation. My current ones make the piano sound “natural”. But they are not as sophisticated as they could be and I hear harmonics and overtones that I shouldn’t hear, so I have to put a blanket behind the piano to soften the sound.

I’ve had a lot of problems with hearing aids. Once, after coming home from the audiologist with a new pair to try, I ran straight to the piano and started to play. The music programme on the hearing aids sounded odd. The top two octaves were distorted and there was a terrible booming sensation. It made me feel awful. I could feel a black cloud of depression coming on, not being able to cope. The NHS told me that most people want to hear speech, not music, so because I was in a minority they couldn’t help me.

Former exuberance

In the New Yorker's Talk of the Town, Lizzie Widdicombe on the fate of the deal toy in an age of austerity:

On an afternoon not long ago, a conference room there [at Icon Recognition] had a day-after-Christmas feeling: boxes everywhere, rows of lonely Lucite toys (a cube with 3-D shoes etched inside, a fake bottle of suntan lotion). “This is definitely a tough time,” Stephen Sokoler, the president of the company, said. He’d been up early working the phones: “You call and ask, ‘Is there anyone who’s announced a deal recently or closed a deal? Anyone you’ve heard of?’ ” He added, “It feels like we’re a ship in the middle of a storm. Not only are you in the storm but there’s no visibility as to whether the storm’s gonna clear.”

Sokoler, who is twenty-nine, came to the company in 2002, and he recalled, with some wistfulness, the go-go days of the business, when, for example, he made a faux emerald-and-ruby crown to celebrate a deal for Merrill Lynch, and J. P. Morgan ordered up a batch of ten-by-fifteen-inch Lucite blocks with dinosaur heads inside (three hundred dollars each)—a “Jurassic Park” reference—to celebrate a deal involving Universal. “That was just a monstrous piece,” Sokoler said.

The most recent era of toys—the one that just ended—had been exuberant, too: a gold-plated replica of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, in Las Vegas, commissioned by Merrill Lynch; a Lucite banana split, commemorating Sun Capital Partners’ acquisition of Friendly’s; a snow globe made for Northoil (“Inside the snow globe we have placed a pewter casting of an oil rig,” the ad material says). Sokoler pointed to a catalogue picture of a little banjo, commemorating a deal that Merrill did for G.E. called Project Bluegrass. “Isn’t that cool?” he said. “You can actually play it.”

(And a follow-up in this week's letters column...)