Under the Sun: This and That

The world becomes strange, increasingly unrecognizable. Landscapes become shiny where they were once dull, or lush. Everywhere there is light. Celebrity divorces reality, but becomes more like us in their excess. Even from above, it seems weird. For the better? Perhaps.

All of this as prelude to your weekly reading list:

- Michael Caine has a blog, which he does not update frequently, but which is oddly entertaining nonetheless. Courtesy of RM, who also informs me that in England, to be caned (Cained?) means among things, to be stoned. Easily my favorite quote from the blog: "Before that I worked on Children of Men which was a short part only two weeks, where I played an ageing Pot smoking Hippy a refugee from the sixties. This part was so different from anything I have ever done."
- Stylus Magazine posts a feature on the Top 50 Rock drummers. 1st and 2nd position are unimpeachable, and, truthfully, undebatable. The rest of the list? Curious.
- The things we keep discovering about monkeys and inventing about robots are both awesome and disconcerting. How we go about discovery is generally bizarre. For example, in this study, where scientists seem to discover that orangutan's have an impressive capacity for communication, understanding of the motivations of others, and some ability to make economic transactions! But then, "[t]o complicate matters for the orangutans, the researchers pretended to either not understand some of the apes' gestures, or none of them at all." Why researchers, why?!
- A review in New Criterion upon the publication of Robert Frost's notebooks.
- The LA Times on how love is like a drug. Chemically.

Photos from a Flickr search for 'solar farm'