Da Vinci had an idea…

for a ‘different’ kind of keyboard. 500 years later someone built one.

[EasyGallery id=’violaorganista’]

A bizarre instrument combining a piano and cello has finally been played to an audience more than 500 years after it was dreamt up Leonardo da Vinci.

Da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance genius who painted the Mona Lisa, invented the ‘‘viola organista’’ – which looks like a baby grand piano – but never built it

Story here

Crickets

Listen, and be transported…

It’s amazing how they use the same tonality that we humans find pleasant to the ear. Anyone who truly knows math and music cannot deny the existence of God- the same patterns all through nature, big and small… The “Music Of The Spheres” indeed.

I had these messages saying that Robbie Robertson said to get in touch with me. So we went in studio. He said, ‘I want you to do whatever you feel like. And, now, these are crickets.’ So I thought, oh, my goodness. I’m to accompany crickets, see?

And when I heard them, I was so ashamed of myself, I was so humbled, because I had not given them enough respect. Jim Wilson recorded crickets in his back yard, and he brought it into the studio and went ahead and lowered the pitch and lowered the pitch and lowered the pitch. And they sound exactly like a well-trained church choir to me. And not only that, but it sounded to me like they were singing in the eight-tone scale. And so what–they started low, and then there was something like I would call, in musical terms, an interlude; and then another chorus part; and then an interval and another chorus. They kept going higher and higher.

They were saying cricket words. I kept thinking, ‘Oh, I almost can understand them. It’s a nice, mellow tone. And they never went off pitch until one of the interludes, where they went real crazy and they got back on again to where they were. And I know that people do not know that they’re listening to crickets unless they’re told that that’s what that is…

Full article here, via a link on Instapundit

Some sage advice for the HHS

On International Men’s Day, HHS tells women to ‘calm down’

Kipling

WHEN the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

    When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

    When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
‘Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

    Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other’s tale-
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

    Man, a bear in most relations-worm and savage otherwise,-
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

    Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger-Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue-to the scandal of The Sex!

    But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

    She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity-must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions-not in these her honour dwells-
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

    She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

    She is wedded to convictions-in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!-
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

    Unprovoked and awful charges-even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons-even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish-like the Jesuit with the squaw!

    So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice-which no woman understands.

    And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern-shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

  — Rudyard Kipling, 1911

Stolen shamelessly from Ace of Spades