Richard Neutra was a draftsman for Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin East.

He went on to be Wright’s contemporary and rival in the Modernist movement.

That rivalry had to be exacerbated when Edgar Kaufmann, for whom Wright had designed and built Fallingwater, chose Neutra to design his winter house in the desert Southwest.

Here’s a good article from when the house was up for auction a few years back that goes into detail about it.

I prefer Fallingwater — but I’m definitely a woods guy, not a desert guy.

This is a fantastic story about an archivist at the Schenectady Museum, Chris Hunter, whose curiosity about thirteen undocumented film canisters took him on a journey that led to the discovery of a recording of a Thomas Edison radio address that had been locked away for over eighty years.  Along the way, the technical gurus he recruited to help him, John Schneiter and Ross DeMuth, had to basically re-invent a 1920s-vintage tape playing technology.

Listen to Edison’s voice here:

Toploader’s 1999 cover of the 1973 King Harvest classic “Dancing in the Moonlight” is pretty darned good — but their video is just plain fun.

Ronnie Barrett is a national treasure.

His company produces some of the coolest machinery in the world — and helps make the US military unmatched in all the world and all history.  Not to mention the civilian versions and how utterly awesome they are.

Let me announce two of my personal goals here:  to meet Ronnie Barrett, and to fire one of his rifles.  Soon.  In both cases.

How ’bout this little gem about Gwyneth Paltrow?

Folks, when anyone tells you that something people have been doing harmlessly for years and years — like going out in the sun without sunscreen for short periods — will kill you and must be completely avoided, those people are either mountebanks or idiots or both.

It looks like a good time to have Gwyneth joining the fold of the sensible — after all, based on the picture in the article (posted below for your medical-science-based scrutiny), she hasn’t looked so good in years!  She must have a great surgeon.  Maybe Dr. Andy Da Lio?

Marathon, that is — I signed up for real a couple days ago.  Game on!

Meanwhile, it was 4+ baking miles this afternoon.  Hot ‘n’ windy here in the upper Midwest.  Glad to have that one behind me.

Today I ran 12 miles almost exactly.

It was 60 degrees out.  Amazing how warm that can feel when it’s also near 100% humidity.  I was drenched when I was done — and I had some weird chills once I cooled down.  But a quick nap under a blanket on the couch took care of that, and I’m feeling pretty good now.

That’s the second personal distance record in two weekends.  Next weekend I get to scale back a bit, then things get really serious.  Bring it on!

I don’t know that I’d ever heard anything of our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission before this weekend.  See here to learn all about it.

What brought it to my attention was this story about how the mission has found a Soviet lunar rover, missing since it stopped transmitting eleven months into its own mission nearly forty years ago.  Just finding the thing is totally cool — but now we’re using it to bounce lasers off the moon, and its performance in this regard is surprisingly good.  Which may eventually help us understand more about lunar conditions.  Amazing.

So because I’m in marathon training, I haven’t been biking much this year — and by extension, I’m late watching a boatload of recordings of the early season races.

But last weekend I finally watched the Paris-Roubaix.  Fabian looked like Johann Museeuw, only let’s hope he wasn’t hopped up on goofballs.  Regardless, his performance was a tour de force, with his breakaway at over 50 km to go for a solo win.  Absolutely stupendous, even if he weren’t just a week past his win at the the Tour of Flanders.

Zounds.

I don’t sleep.

Well, okay, I do sleep.  Just not nearly as much as most people.  An average night is probably five hours.  It’s not all that unusual for me to get by on three, even for a number of nights in a row (especially when I travel).

It used to bother me quite a bit, and I remember reading once that you had to make up lost sleep eventually.  That made me figure that, if the eight hours per night “rule” was correct, I’d eventually need to be Rip Van Winkle.

So I figured out a long time ago what this article tells us — you generally need as much sleep as you get.