Pinstripe Nation Waves White Flag

Or were they throwing in the towel? I couldn’t tell. How sweep!

(AP Photo/Eric Gay)

PBS Airtime

I met with Jerry Franklin, President & CEO of Connecticut Public Broadcasting last week. He thinks Bumpspark* will make a great national PBS series. He has committed to airing the pilot episode and guiding the larger series through the proper national PBS and NPR channels. I just sent out a press release.

Ghosts

I went to see Dr. John Leinhard speak. The NPR commentator on ingenuity talked about ghosts in books, how the spirits of individuals remain in the volumes they’ve written or have read. He spoke about the ahead-of-her-time Jane Marcet, who’s Conversations on Chemistry was one of a number of educational books she wrote around 1806. Even more unexpected, she wrote them in the form of a conversation between two girls and herself.

Leinhard owns a copy with an Ex Libris entry by the great scientist Michael Faraday. Conversations fell into Faraday’s hands when he was a fifteen-year old bookbinder in London. This was certainly one of the books that started him on his destiny with electricity. Leinhard takes great pleasure in the fact that Marcet’s book would eventually be updated, in the 1800s, with an experiment by Faraday.

I gave Leinhard my Bumpspark* proposal and he enjoyed it. He said great conversations usually entail the counterparts’ willingness to be wrong and he wondered how many would be so willing, while on camera. My hope is that there are more than we would think. Speaking with both Robert Pinsky and Alan Lightman recently, I brought up Leinhard’s question and they both felt, or hoped, they would be that open.

Preparing for my meeting with Professor Lightman, I read my old copy of his Einstein’s Dreams again, full of jottings and highlights. I realized he is a part of my project because I learned from him and my ideas and projects come from his. Lightman confessed he remembers all the drafts of his books, not only the sentences he finally gives the printer, but all the versions of each sentence that came before. When reading them in public, he sometimes gets confused.

When our talk was over he signed my old copy of his most famous book and I thought of Leinhard’s ghosts. I am anxious to make my show.

Whaditelya?

Sure, the Yankees always come back in the ninth, but who always comes back three games down in the ALCS? It’s a whole new century folks.

Been Here Before

To my fellow Red Sox fans who are down tonight, might I remind you of the Full Eclipse.

Beyond Mashups

There are gimmicks like The Grey Album and then there are real musical efforts of collaboration between the unlikely.

Hear what happens when two Mexico City artists move to Dublin on the self-titled album of Rodrigo Y Gabriela.

Then stand in line with me a week from tomorrow when Robert Plant and Alison Krauss release the T-Bone Burnett produced Raising Sand. One review I read said this is no he said, she said duet album, but two great artists struggling to create a third distinct thing. Exactly what I hope.

Bumpspark* Business

The Chicago-based innovation company Inventables searches around the globe for new technologies, gathers them in a kind of swatch book, and delivers them to R&D departments at P&G, Nike and Mattel so they can bumpspark them against their products and services.

Genius!