MuseBlog

A thread by popular request. OK, Phoenix & Co.–over to you!

Anyone feel like checking and listing some links?

We’ve already got these:

p. 8: Ascension Island (www.ascension-island.gov.ac/)

p. 27: Icing the Kicker (www.sciencenewsforkids.org/pages/puzzlezone/muse/muse0905.asp)

p. 48: Exploring News & Features: Mole Gives Fast Food New Meaning (exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_mole.htm)

Still needed: URLS on pages 5, 43, 44 (lots), 45 (lots), 46 (lots), and 47 (lots, some in the “Muse Contest” box).

Thanks,

R. C.

September 2005 (volume 9, number 7)

COVER: Styling Food

FIRST PAGE: Alien Attack, Assignment: Earth

KOKOPELLI & COMPANY: Feather and Mimi go native.

ARTICLES AND COLUMNS:

• The Ragbag Rainforest, by Fred Pearce
• A Surfeit of Coneys, by Paul Baker
• The New Coke Disaster, by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Food Stylist’s Art, by Doug Stewart
• Code Warriors, by Jennifer Jacobson
• Q & A, by Robert Coontz and Rosanne Spector: Where did the atmosphere come from? What makes a person’s face look older after puberty?
• Math Page, by Ivars Peterson: Icing the Kicker

LAST PAGE: Holey Moley! [star-nosed mole]

Queen J. turns 12 on September 2. She requests/decrees that everybody wear her favorite color, orange.

In the February 1999 “Muse Mail,” then-13-year-old Dana Mannino suggested that Bo should eat Kokopelli to give scientists an inside look at a cow’s digestive system. She’s been writing to the magazine ever since. Here’s her latest note, e-mailed to MuseBlog as she starts her sophomore year at Gonzaga University:

I’m loving/hating college. Right now mostly hating because it starts on Tuesday and I had a really great summer in which I did nothing but read books that I like, at my pace and without having to underline for quotes in a paper. OK, so I also played with my sisters, spent six weeks studying Spanish in Mexico, and went on my first backpacking trip with my Dad, but I still rate my summer in time spent reading for pleasure.

I figure that the love it part of college will kick back in within the next two weeks. I intend to double major in Spanish and Philosophy, but you’ll be happy to know that I’m pursuing journalistic interests on the side. I’m taking journalism classes and I’m a part of the editorial team for a student magazine. I edit the Faith section, because that’s what I know, but I have ambitions to someday contribute to the highly competitive and campus renown mirth section. I want to do a piece about living at home with my family while I go to college. My peers are tired in class because they pull all nighters. I’m tired because my four year old sister still wets the bed sometimes and I have to get up and change the sheets. I also have to be careful to check the back of my pages before I turn in papers, sometimes they’ve been used for coloring. It gets pretty laughable around here.

I checked out your blog. LOTR freaks, musicians, Muppet fans, other people who spend all summer reading, an administrator who can’t operate a cell phone — gee, sounds like I’d fit right in. We’ll see how often life allows me to check in on it. As for life after Muse, the main change has been that Muse has morphed from a much anticipated semi monthly delight, to a epic internal struggle between scholastic obligations and desire, usually terminating in a tragic metaphor for the relinquishing of childhood pleasure in order to make room for adult stress as I reluctantly hand the magazine to my sister and tearfully ask her to recap the articles for me when shes done. I still get a little reading in on break and before bed sometimes, when I don’t have to tell bedtime stories. Hmm, that sounded pretty good. OK,  ( Dana turns on the fan and types into it so as to attain eerie effect.) Build the topic and she will come.

A fan forever,

Dana

If so, please post comments here. We’re eager to hear what you think about the Muse Magazine Fan Page and MuseBlog, and how we can help make them better for you and your kids.

(Note that Muse‘s editors and publisher are not involved in this Web site. Any comments or business concerning the magazine should be sent directly to them.)

*Unfinished Gaboomba Business:

Need we say more?

All,

When submitting comments, please leave the “URL” field in your comment form blank. Otherwise it takes us longer to post the comments–and those valuable seconds add up. Time is all we have, you know…

Philosophically,
R.C.

If the Muses enrolled at Hogwarts, where would the Sorting Hat assign them?

This is for a Fan Page project, to be unveiled in the fullness of time. For now, you know the Muses (in alphabetical order: Aeiou, Bo, Chad, Crraw, Feather, Kokopelli, Mimi, Pwt, and Urania). You know the houses (Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin). Who goes where? Opinions, please.

(MuseBloggers are all Ravenclaws, of course.)

The Fan Page’s links list for January-July 2005 is still blank, and it doesn’t look as if I’ll ever have time to compile it. Can anyone help?

It’s easy: just go through an issue looking for URLs. For each one, note the page it’s on, try it online to make sure it works, and write down what the page is called. (Viewing the header information in the source code is the best way to make sure you’ve got its real name.) Then post the list as a comment here.

There probably won’t be many–just three or four per issue, as I recall. Even one issue would help. In exchange, the undying gratitude of all Musedom will be yours.

Thanks!

–Yr. Overcommitted Webmusester

Issues needed: January, February, March, April, May/June, July/August. All done. Thanks!

She turns 14 on Saturday the 27th.

Robert Coontz writes:

My Q&A co-columnist Rosanne Spector and I live on opposite coasts, so it’s always a treat to see each other in person. This week she was in town visiting her parents and stopped by my office, and we went to dinner. I tried to commemorate the occasion by taking a snapshot with my new cell phone, but I hit the wrong button and wound up making this short video clip instead. (Here’s another version that has better picture quality but that doesn’t work in as many browsers.)

Don’t we look utterly clueless?

(The glimpse of my computer keyboard happened when we turned the phone around to see what was going on.)

Just guessing, but it looks as if this topic is ready to stand on its own. If so, here’s the place to post.

Every so often, Muse‘s editor-in-chief (She Who Must Not Be Named) sends around a packet of recent letters to the magazine for her minions to read. We can’t reprint them here, because some of them might be bound for the Muse Mail page, but we can summarize what they say. Here’s the most recent batch:

Who’s writing: 8 girls, 4 boys, 1 male Elf, and 1 male mixed-breed dog

Ages, where specified: 8, 10, 11, 12 (two writers), 13 (four writers), 15, 17, 18

Where they live: California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Washington, D.C., and Scotland

Favorite Muses, where specified: Kokopelli (4); Crraw tied with Kokopelli (1); Urania, Bo (1 each)

Least favorite Muses: Aeiou, Pwt

Favorite things from the magazine: “Baffled Brain” issue, bonobos, LOTR issue, Notscape, “The Incredible Upside-Downs”

Dislikes: Self-esteem issue; reference to evolution in the Bonobo article

Requests: pen-pal service; where Devil is; articles on band instruments, how CDs work, music piracy, invention of the telephone, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings (again?!), rugby, Japan

July/August 2005 (volume 9, number 6)

COVER: Baffling Your Brain

FIRST PAGE: Trompe l’oeil Tomfoolery

KOKOPELLI & COMPANY: The Muses become disillusioned.

ARTICLES AND COLUMNS:

• The Baffled Brain, by Carl Zimmer

p. 11: Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena, by Michael Bach (www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html)
p. 16: Rensink/CBR Attention Paradigm (Change-Blindness Demo) (www.usd.edu/psyc301/Rensink.htm)
p. 16: Another demonstration (nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/slow%c20changes%20bis/intro.html)

• The Upside-Downs, by Gustave Verbeek
• A Family Affair: The Cassini Line of Mapmakers, by Val Ross
• Frans [de Waal] and [chimp] Friends
• Q & A, by Robert Coontz and Rosanne Spector: Why do we get shadows under our eyes when we lose sleep? How does a water filter work?

p. 24: HistoryofWaterFilters.com (www.historyofwaterfilters.com)

• Math Page, by Ivars Peterson: Seeing Things

p. 19: Seeing Things (www.sciencenewsforkids.org/pages/puzzlezone/muse/muse0705.asp)

LAST PAGE: A Cutty Sark? [fool-the-eye sculpture]

We’re posting this a day early so she’ll be sure to see it.

By popular request. But why limit it to Muse?

With new faces appearing on the blog almost every day, it’s getting hard to tell everybody apart. So here’s a place to say a few words about yourself, if you like. No full names or identifying details, please: just things like general location (state, or country if foreign and exciting), grade, musical instruments you play, Hogwarts house, etc. Plus a 10,000-word essay on “What Muse Means to Me.” (Just kidding about that last one–though “Muse Mail” does get letters at least that long.)

Again, this thread is strictly voluntary. We’re all for privacy, as you know. If you’d rather stay mysterious, that’s fine, too.

Check out the Muse Magazine Fan Page’s new look!

I’ve revamped the home page and slapped new title bars on the main parts of the site. Next come a million little details. A lot of things probably won’t work quite right for a while, but that’s the price you pay.

There’s no question that the MMFP was long overdue for a makeover. What lit the fuse is that company is coming! Word has it that the magazine is going to run our URL in the September issue, so with luck, MuseBlog should soon be aswarm with new faces. Party manners, everybody…

–R. C.

*Unfinished Gaboomba Business:

In Message 187, some of you launched a plan to write a letter to Muse Mail. Here’s a place to continue that worthy effort.

Lay ’em on us. We’re all ears.

News you may have missed while basking in the summer sun:

Coming up:

.

Muse‘s most colorful contributor doesn’t know how to have a dull summer:

How’s my summer going? Well, I’ve written an explanation of Hot Pink Bunnies in Elizabethan English (I’m beginning to think normal people don’t get these requests. Maybe it’s because I’m British). I’ve just done a big thing on the Tower of London, which drove the Queen of Muses potty because all the facts had to be double-checked and it needed a poster for the Big Diagram.

I sold a symphony. The sort with a handle, not the sort with oboes and cellos and things.

I built a computer. It has glowing Martian eyes, three hard disks, internal neon lights, five cooling fans, round IDE cables, and lots of other boring tech stuff.

I played music for a wedding on a farm.

I spent two days in a sweltering, airless hall in Stafford, recording the Staffordshire Youth Recorder & Renaissance Ensemble. Me, Uncle Terry, about thirty kids, and a huge collection of recorders, viols, rebecs, shawms, bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies. In England, we still let kids loose on these things. Health & Safety would ban it in America.

Yesterday I dashed round the Midlands trying to get some decent video footage of a donkey. Any donkey. I repeat. Normal people don’t get these requests…..

A thread for sharing your favorite books, movies, music, websites, etc., and adding them to the list in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GABOOMBA.

New policy: at the rate this blog is developing, keeping the HG2Gab updated would be a nightmare. From now on, you do the work. MuseBlog is it. Enjoy!

Attention, 13-year-old Musers!

The cover story on this week’s Time magazine (August 8, 2005) is a Special Report called “Being 13,” described as “a close look inside the mysterious and often confounding world of the 13-year-old.” Guess what: you’re fascinating. Enjoy your week of fame.