Few things could have been more amusing to a twelve-year-old in 1996 than an Amish-themed parody of the late Coolio’s portentously grim life-in-the-hood anthem “Gangsta’s Paradise.” As luck would have it, “Weird Al” Yankovic released just such a song in 1996, when I happened to be twelve years old myself. Like everyone who’s been a kid at some point in the past 40 years, I grew up hearing and appreciating Yankovic’s prolific output of parodies, pastiches, and even original songs. From “Eat It” to “Smells like Nirvana” to “White and Nerdy,” there was hardly a pop-music phase of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood that he didn’t make funny.

That’s to make funny, as distinct from to make fun of: unlike that of a predecessor in comedy songwriting like Tom Lehrer, Yankovic’s body of work evidences not the least tendency toward harshness or ridicule.

Hence his appeal from his very first recording “My Bologona,” an accordion-based parody of “My Sharona” recorded in the bathroom of his college radio station, to no less an advocate of silliness […]

The world, we often hear, used to be bigger. Today, if you feel the faintest twinge of curiosity about a distant place — Beijing, Paris, Cambodia, Egypt — you can near-instantaneously call up countless hours of high-quality video footage shot there, and with only a little more effort even communicate in real-time with people actually living there. This may be the case in the early twenty-first century, but it certainly wasn’t in the early twentieth. If you’d wanted to see the world back then, you either had to travel it yourself, an expensive and even dangerous proposition, or else hire a team of expert photographers to go forth and capture it for you.

Albert Kahn, a successful French banker and speculator, did both. A few years after making his own trip around the world, taking stereographic photos and even motion-picture footage along the way, he came up with the idea for a project called Les archives de la planète, or The Archives […]

At its peak in the second century, the Roman Empire dominated nearly two million square miles of the world. As with most such grand achievements, it couldn’t have happened without the development of certain technologies. The long reach of the Eternal City was made possible in large part by the humble technology of the road — or at least it looks like a humble technology here in the twenty-first century. Roads existed before the Roman Empire, of course, but the Romans built them to new standards of length, capacity, and durability. How they did it so gets explained in the short video above.

On a representative stretch of Roman-road-to be, says the narrator, a “wide area would be deforested.” Then “the topsoil would be removed until a solid base was found.” Atop that base, workers laid down curbs at the width determined by the road plan, then filled the gap between them with a foundation of large stones.

Atop the large stones went a layer of smaller stones mixed with fine aggregates, and finally the gravel, sand, and clay that made […]

If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

For most of humanity, this might mean nabbing a lick or two from Paul McCartney’s playbook.

For Paul McCartney, it meant borrowing from Bach – the fifth movement from Suite in E minor for Lute, to be specific.

As he explained during the above 2005 appearance on the Parkinson Show, when he and his buddy, George Harrison, used to sit around teaching themselves basic rock n’ roll chords, their show off move was a bit of semi-classical fingerpicking that Sir Paul modestly claimed to be “not very good at:”

It was actually classical but we made it semi.

Thusly did the chord progressions of Bach’s Bourree in E minor  – a piece which “I never knew the title of, which George and I had learned to play at an early age; he better than me actually”  – inspire Blackbird:

Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me. Bach was always one of our favorite composers; […]

Last night, Miley Cyrus and David Byrne performed David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on the NBC holiday special Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party. And they also treated viewers to a performance of “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia. Not a bad way to send off 2022.

Before leaving 2022 behind, we’ll also flag another Miley Cyrus collaboration–a performance from this summer’s celebration of the life of Taylor Hawkins. Below, watch her take the stage with Def Leppard and perform “Photograph” at the 3:45. No doubt, she can sing.

Happy 2023.

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