| A recess for parents
Children climb on the brightly colored rubber inflatables and bounce in a toy filled with small colored balls. A little boy rides on a toy train and another waits to share the adventure. There are squeals of laughter, the sounds of racing feet and soft music playing in a corner of the room. It's a typical morning at Froggy's Playground, on Davenport's Brady Street. The large room looks like an average daycare center, but, it's not, says Dr. Dwight Bailey, a Davenport psychologist. Dr. Bailey who recently opened what he calls a recess center for parents. The center is set up to facilitate parents' free time, time to go to the doctor's, shopping, study for an exam, have date night with your spouse or just an hour or two of "down time," Dr. Bailey says. "It's difficult to take the kids with you everywhere.
Family-unfriendly titles carve niche
Back in the days of VHS, a grisly tape called "Faces of Death" ruled grade-school sleepovers. Boys would snag copies from elder siblings of the "banned in 40 countries" film and its sequels, which offered sometimes-real, often-fake views of public executions, crocodile attacks and fatal boxing matches. The clips doubtlessly would be chased with a Playboy video purloined from the closet of a friend's father. Twenty years later, guys don't need to ask around for an "Ultimate Fighting Championship" or titillating "Girls Gone Wild" DVD -- they simply hit the local Best Buy or Amazon.com. Such fringe programming -- which often enjoys a lucrative audience niche but also has baggage of one form or another -- is now so accessible that it's constituting an ever-larger slice of a overall homevid pie that generated about $24 billion in consumer spending last year.
Ancient manuscripts are music to professor’s ears
Most musicians find their music in stores; Dr. Olga Malyshko finds hers partly eaten by worms in ancient European cathedrals.
Driven by a life-long passion for medieval music and its history, Malyshko, a professor in the school of music at Queens University, has spent most of her career working with ancient manuscripts of medieval music.
On my knees, on a stone floor, with ultraviolet light in this hand, the manuscript, the sheet, on a styrofoam stand, and my score paper here, to which I transcribe, I reconstructed the whole thing, text and music, Malyshko says of one of the songs she found.
Shes spent a lot of time in cathedrals in Europe where first-hand research in various libraries has resulted in the reconstruction of many songs that had been lost for centuries.
Leopard Delay, iPhone Hype - Apple Knows What It Is Doing
AnitoKid submits: Instead of debuting Leopard at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA, this June 2007, Apple Inc. (AAPL) will release "a near final version" of Mac OS X 10.5, a sort of preview of the complete feature set at that time. Bad news? Perhaps for the fierce Mac users, but overall? Hmmm. Let me check the facts first. iPhone is right on track – passing several required certification tests and is expected to start shipping in late June as originally planned. The device is touted to have the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has come with a price. Engineering resources at AAPL have reportedly been diverted from Leopard to the mobile device, possibly indicating the firmness of Apple's belief that the market holds tremendous promise and business opportunities for the entity.
Jazz Music in Chiang Mai is Getting Noteworthy
Fifteen years ago in Chiang Mai, there was not much difference between a jazz musician and a monk. That is to say, jazz was an extremely lonely pursuit indeed, not to mention esoteric and highly unprofitable. Jazz vocalist Bella Intaranan recalls those days with a bittersweet frustration. In 1992 she and her well-known husband Teh opened one of Chiang Mais first jazz venues, 'The Baritone'. Keen to bring this unique art form to the then-provincial little town, they were greeted with ambivalence. We had to sell our souls, she recalls, We were forced to play pop and rock and anything people wanted to hear just to keep the place open. Though The Baritone eventually closed, the new wave of jazz appreciation theyre currently riding more than makes up for the drought of yesteryear; their new Tha Chang Jazz Club is packed every weekend with local jazz aficionados and musicians looking for their fix of an increasingly popular elixir: improvisational jazz in a city jam-packed with copycat cover bands.
Front row center: Lansing dancers are on their toes Sunday
Cinderella has enchanted generations in every medium possible. She tells her story with books, movies, paintings, music, and dance. This Sunday, area audiences can be mesmerized by the tale again through the Greater Lansing Ballet Company's traditional telling of it through a ballet. "It's a very familiar story line," explained founding artistic director Barbara Banasikowski Smith. "There is humor in it as well as a feeling of sympathy for Cinderella as she is not able to go to the ball. It's very magical." .
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