Today, on the spur of the moment, I decided to visit the Nethercutt museum in Sylmar, which I had heard about a couple of years ago when I was researching automatic music instruments. The museum, an unexpected display of wealth that sits on the corner of an industrial park in an economically depressed area — all yard sales, grafitti and auto repair shops — is one of the San Fernando Valley’s hidden gems. I am reminded a bit of the gustatory majesty that is Brent’s Deli, sitting in an unassuming strip mall next to a carpet outlet in Northridge.

Most people visit this place for the classic cars, which are clearly the focus of the collection. The museum houses well over a hundred antique, classic and unique cars, including lots of Packards, Deusenbergs and Rolls Royces.

I am more interested, however, in automatic music instruments, so I happily skipped past the gleaming vehicles to check out the nickelodeons, orchestreons and music boxes that can be found, mostly unlabeled, in a central aisle of the museum. A lot more instruments, including a Wurlitzer Theatre Organ, are housed in the imposing edifice across the street, but this requires a guided tour to see. A very muscular security guard blocked the doorway, so I’ll have to come back after making reservations, or perhaps attend one of the occasional silent movie and organ concerts.

One of the most interesting instruments on display in the auto showroom is a Bow Front Violano Virtuoso, shown above. According to various sources only 13 to 17 of these bow front models are known to exist. The specimen at the Nethercutt museum still works, and many of the patrons inserted nickels to hear it play “old-timey” music, perhaps unaware that the machine they are putting their nickels into is worth about 3 or 4 million nickels.

I took a few close-up photos with my cell phone of the prominently displayed automatic violin mechanism, which is very cool. There is a set of 4 rotating wheels which act as a bow on each string. Each wheel receives rosin from a feed which sits above the bow wheels. The strings are separated from the fingerboard of the violin, and connected to what appears to be an automatic tuning mechanism. When played, the strings are pressed with a series of metal fingers. The mechanism appears to have been inspired, in part, by the Hurdy Gurdy, which dates back to the 10th century.

On Tim Trager’s Website, there is a very cool set of photos of a scanned brochure showing the Mills Novelty factory where these instruments were made, around 1915. A couple of the cards are shown below.

Whoever made this had too much time on his/her hands.
— Truth-lover

Some people have way too much free time on their hands.
— MattK

Someone has a little too much time on their hands – the result is cool.
— specialk420

Who has the time to think something like this up?
— kristen_kish

OK…someone had wwwaaayyyy too much time on their hands…but it is kinda fun! :)
— myron

Do you have too much free time? :-)
— Tom on Formosa

I won’t spoil it for you, the only thing I will say is that someone has waaay too much free time on their hands.
— Jedicraft

Today, I accidentally discovered the game of Facebook-whacking (remember Googlewhacks?), in which you find various search phrases for which your friends are the number one result, when you search on Facebook.

You can accomplish this by stringing out-of-context words from the “Info” section of someone’s facebook profile. The more TV shows, bands, and movies they have listed, the easier it is.

Some of my friends can be found on Facebook by searching for:

muppet ninja
adore massive sex
pelican f***ing
psycho playboy
grimy men
tasty manure
ugly shakespeare
impossible jewish artist
love fresh boy

and many, many more! Some are more descriptive of the actual person than others…

Try it! What can *you* come up with?

My company, Topspin (which I dearly love), is currently hiring for two positions. A sys admin in Santa Monica, and a SQL DB admin in San Francisco. You can find out more about these positions, and our awesome startup, here.

If you’re a command-line-happy nerd who likes to use scp (secure copy) to copy files to one or more remote web-servers, you may come to love this script, which I wrote a few years ago, and which I use numerous times every day. It saves a lot of typing when I’m updating files on my web-servers via the command-line (which is how I usually do it).

If the previous sentence does not describe you, then run! Run for the hills!

Here’s a page describing my script, mcp, along with a link to download it.

Many computers measure time as the seconds elapsed since 1970. This number is shown below, in universal time.

In a few hours (6:31:30PM ET) it is expected to reach the magic number of 1234567890

( Update: You missed it! – reset your computer clock to reexperience it! )

You are advised to celebrate exuberantly, which will provide stimulus to the global economy.

Here’s a link to a full-screen version. Enjoy!

Update: Festivities are over. Here’s what happened at 6:31 eastern time at the location above. Not visible in the picture are a number of us behind the camera quaffing beer.

While visiting the Gold Bug shop in Pasadena, a wonderful place that more closely resembles a cabinet of curiosity than a gift store, jewelry shop or art gallery, I was reminded of my love for the unclassifiable.

Its a fundamental problem that accompanies our need for taxonomy, I guess. When I used to visit real record stores (remember those?), they had racks for “Rock”, “Jazz”, “Classical” and so on, but often, the music I liked best was the stuff that didn’t fit neatly into one of those racks. Is Laurie Anderson rock? Not really, but that’s where they put her. Unfortunately, the “hard to classify” quality that made her so interesting also made her hard to sell, I imagine. It’s easier to sell something when there’s an obvious shelf to put it on.

The best stores have a special shelf set aside for this stuff. It might say “Other” or “Miscellaneous” or “Weird shit”. This is my shelf — I’m always looking for the “Other” shelf.

If I’m presented with an online store catalog, and it provides an “Other” – that’s the first thing I look at. I know the most interesting things will be sitting in that collection, gathering dust.

For example, the first time I visited the iPhone app store, and was presented with the following categories:

Games
Entertainment
Utilities
Social Networking
Music
Productivity
Lifestyle
.
.
.

The first thing I did was scroll to the bottom of the list. It ended with

.
.
.
Weather
Books
Medical

“Crap!” I thought. “Where’s Other?” The lack of an “Other” shelf means that some remarkably innovative apps are probably getting misfiled (under Enterainment or Lifestyle or who knows what), and they are not being discovered (although I imagine social networks can ameliorate this problem a bit).

By the way, after kvetching for a bit, I checked out the stuff in “Medical”. Woah!

Similarly, when I occasionally find myself filling out surveys, I hate it when I get a series of multiple choice questions that don’t provide an “other” on each and every question whose choices don’t encompass the known universe of possibility. For example, the “What Industry are you employed in?” question on many registration forms appears to have been constructed at some time in the 1980s, and has no actual bearing on the present universe. Yes, I use computers for a living, but I am neither in “High Tech,” nor in “Engineering,” nor “Communications” nor “Entertainment”. For much of my career, I’ve been in businesses which straddle these areas, among others.

If I’m filling out a paper survey that has a question like this, I simply pencil in my own “Z: Other” and circle it.

For online surveys you end up being forced to pick a close but inappropriate answer, which causes the survey to artificially fit into the marketer’s predefined world view. Yuck.

So, back to my hypothetical record store. What causes something to go on the “other” shelf? There are a few principal reasons I can think of:

A) It straddles two or more categories, such as PDQ Bach, which is both classical music and comedy (and often succeeds at being neither).

B) The actual category is so small it’s uneconomical to provide a unique shelf, such as Sound Effects and Bird Song records (both of which I own, due to my penchant for scouring the “Other” bin). Speaking of which, Goldbug, which got me started on this tirade, has a highly desirable, but pricey, collection of ingeniously designed birdcalls. Check ’em out. I want ’em all.

C) It is a pioneering work, which may one day have company in its own category. Or it might, if anyone manages to find it.

D) Other.

A collection of images from the Victoria Australia Bush Fires group on Flickr.

Interactive version here.

Thanks to Pamela Fox for alerting me to this group.

UPDATE: These photos have been pulled from Flickr, apparently due to copyright issues. If I find a similar collection, I’ll post an updated mosaic.

Francine Kizner does a nice write-up of the “Data+Art” show at the PMCA where I have a couple pieces.

Link

Of course I’m biased, but I think the show is really cool. My favorite show in Los Angeles since the Visual Music exhibit at MOCA a few years ago.

If I find other press / blog coverage, I’ll post it here…

UPDATE

Here’s an L.A. Times article on the show.

Etude in G Minor, 1983

I thought it might be a good idea to catalog and record all my old piano pieces, many of which exist solely in my head, and haven’t been notated or recorded. “Etude in G Minor” is something I used to play a lot in 1983, during a period when I was experimenting with a more impressionistic style. These recordings were made yesterday, in my living room, on my creaky old piano, in dire need of tuning and repair.

Here’s a few more:

Hymn (1977)
7 Pianos Theme (1982)
C Jam (1983)
One Zero One Zero (1984)
Happy Song in C (1985)
Janet’s Blues (1986)
Crooked Waltz (1994)
Sedley’s Lament (1994)

9 Piano Pieces by Jim Bumgardner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.