With my djembe needing a new goatskin, I dropped it off yesterday at Motherland Music in Culver City. Drum Heaven! The place has a retail showroom, a drum repair workshop, and space for classes and performances.

After parking on the street, I followed the sound of drums through the front door of the shop. Turns out I’d shown up in the middle a drum circle in full swing. A good 15-20 people of all ages, genders, and colors were becoming one with the universe.

Yelling over the sounds of the instruments, I met Dan and one of his workers, filled out some paperwork, and asked a few questions about what the occasion was. Dan invited to hang out for the rest of the day, as they were having a party out in the back, with food, drink, and another drum circle.

I spent some time looking around the shop. Any lover of drums could lose herself for days! The place is packed with authentic djembes, doumbeks, congas, ashikos, talking drums, shakers/rattlers, and more world percussion instruments than you can pronounce. The store also sells sheet music, cds, all kinds of accessories, and miscellaneous imported drum-related knick-knacks. (I bought much-needed djembe bag, which fits my drum perfectly. I can wear it like a backpack.)

Here are some shots I snapped in no particular order.

“In most musical instruments the resonator is made of wood while the actual sound generator is of animal origin. In cultures where music is still used as a magical force, the making of an instrument always involves the sacrifice of a living being. That being’s soul then becomes part of the instrument and in the tones that come forth, the ‘singing dead,’ who are ever present with us, make themselves heard.”
— Joscelyn Godwin, 1987

M, Georges, M, me. Video chat, Hollywood and San Pedro CA.

And some of my best friends have told me I’m the most negative person they know. Via M.

Gnar gnar. Via GrindTV:

The last thing most surfers would want to see is a great white shark circling their board. But when two of the notorious apex predators began swimming around Chuck Patterson earlier this week off San Onofre in northern San Diego County, he saw opportunity.

Patterson, 41, who lives in nearby Dana Point, paddled out at the same spot the next day with a high-definition camera mounted on a 10-foot pole, and used the apparatus to probe the murky green water around his board. The result is the accompanying video, which shows what presumably are the same two sharks: an estimated nine-footer and a seven-footer, milling beneath him as he paddled.

The larger shark showed up first, and slapped Patterson’s board with its tail before swimming off. The smaller shark circled his board for 12 minutes.

Such an encounter might make an ordinary surfer want to sprint atop water to the nearest dry land. But Patterson, a champion paddler and all-around waterman, is comfortable in the knowledge that Southern California is seasonal nursery ground for juvenile great whites, which are fairly abundant this summer and prey mostly on small fishes and other sharks.

Still, it required steely resolve to venture back out and stand once more above two of creatures capable of inflicting deadly wounds, and to do so with a steady hand.

I was a big Rubik’s Cube fan. When I was about 10 years old, I locked myself in my room with a solution book and became the kid in class who could solve the thing in under a minute.

There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible varying positions for the Rubik’s Cube. (That’s 43 QUINTILLION, people.) Thanks to some resources donated by Google, a team of mathematicians and programmers has now determined that any of these varying positions can be solved within 20 moves.

It gets even gnarlier:

Every solver of the Cube uses an algorithm, which is a sequence of steps for solving the Cube. One algorithm might use a sequence of moves to solve the top face, then another sequence of moves to position the middle edges, and so on. There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves.

One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm, one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves; this is known as God’s Algorithm. The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called God’s Number. At long last, God’s Number has been shown to be 20.

Grover confirms what marriage is. Out of the mouths of babes.

Rallied on a Wednesday night to hopefully find scalpage for Rush at thee ol’ Universal Amphitheater. NO DICE. With the low-end at $275 and buyers outnumbering scalpers at least four to one, we quickly switched gears and turned it into a nice summer night hanging out on Universal CityWalk.

Universal City CA, 08.11.2010

“Facebook, Target, poker, religion, food, sports, etcetera will not replace having a brain, people. We’re getting dumber and more ignorant by the day. Yeah, actually, I’m talking to you. Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing, and video games. Then again, I’m writing this on Facebook, I just came home from Target, I may do a little Texas Hold Em before bed, I’ve thanked God that my week is almost over, I just ate some damn good BBQ chicken, and I thought about how the Dodgers are doing. But I swear I’m gonna read that Jackie Collins book before the end of the summer.”
— Aloha Marine

Kauai, 1991.