I met Bradley Bergey in Seattle where we worked together for two years at the Children’s Institute for Learning Differences on Mercer Island.

Around the same time, we each moved from Seattle to different parts of the world : I moved to Alaska and he moved to Mexico City. Over the next 4-5 years, we visited each other regular and I had the good fortune of watching him evolve from a naturally gifted painter into a focused and even more talented artist.

To boot, he’s an amazing educator, the kind of teacher I’m jealous his students get to have. World-traveled, intuitive, imaginative, playful and wise beyond his years - he’s a bona fide compliment to the practice.

Recently, Bergey was featured in Art and Letter, a monthly webzine focused on Architecture, Art and Design.

You can read the interview in its entirety here, if you likey.

He’s our pal and we’re very proud of him : )

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from wikipedia :

The first patent for a compact epicyclic hub gear was granted in 1895. This was a 2-speed but was not commercially successful. In 1896 William Reilly of Salford, England patented a broadly similar 2-speed hub which went into production in 1898 as ‘The Hub’. It was a great success, remaining in production for a decade. It rapidly established the practicality of compact epicylic hub gears.

By 1902 Reilly had designed a 3-speed hub gear. He parted company with the manufacturer of ‘The Hub’ but had signed away to them the intellectual rights to his future gear designs. To circumvent this problem, the patents for Reilly’s 3-speed were obtained in the name of his colleague, James Archer. Meanwhile, well-known English journalist and inventor Henry Sturmey had also invented a 3-speed hub. In 1903 Frank Bowden, head of the Raleigh Cycle Company, formed The Three-Speed Gear Syndicate, having obtained the rights to both the Reilly/Archer and Sturmey 3-speeds. Reilly’s hub went into production as the first Sturmey Archer 3-speed.[5]

In 1902 Mikael Pedersen (who also produced the Dursley Pedersen bicycle) patented a 3-speed hub gear and this was produced in 1903. This was said to be based on the “counter shaft” principle but was arguably an unusual epicylic gear, in which a second sun was used in place of an annulus.

By 1909 there were 14 different 3-speed hub gears on the British market.

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• Flash
• | QuickTime
• | iPod

Pollee and I recently returned from our old neighborhood in Juneau, Alaska for our pals’ [Jorden and Bret] wedding.

Juneau saw some of its finest weather that week and a pod of humpbacks graced us with their presence all weekend.

This is the best clip of them all - as a few of us stood on the shore at Adlersheim these beauties hung out in the bay at the closest range many of us have ever witnessed - the end of the clip shows Topaz standing within mere feet as they swim by.

Thanks, Ryan, for having your digi with you!

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Pollee and i hadn’t yet been to see a movie in a theater in 2008.

How suhweeet that we waited…

Last night, we drove out to see The Dark Knight at IMAX.

Easily thee best action-hero movie made so far.

It topped $400 million last week. Will it beat Titanic’s $600 mil?

At $14.50 a ticket, it’s not cheap to see a flick at IMAX but totally worth it, especially considering tix to regular, non-6-story-high-screen-theaters are $10. It truly was an EXPERIENCE.

Ledger’s role will be huge shoes to fill in the next one but, all told, the film was one of the greatest ever IMO.

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• Flash
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Jen and Phole are on their way to live and work near the hahbah in Bahston!

We celebrated with them on Tuesday night before they set off on their long journey, but not without helping workaround a glitch here and there ; )

Above you can enjoy a quick, stop-motion memory of the two of them discovering they’d successfully locked themselves out of their garage.

Fortunately, Phole was able to figure out the fit of the lock was just a lil on the tight side [Meta helped, too], which means it’ll fit juuuust right come winter.

Just like that, problem solved - which has me feeling that’s how smoov things will go for them in MA.

Safe journey - we’ll be out to visit soon : )

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…you want to learn how to yodel like cowboy Wylie here :

From Wikipedia :

Yodeling (or yodelling, jodeling) is a form of singing that involves singing an extended note which rapidly and repeatedly changes in pitch from the vocal or chest register (or “chest voice”) to the falsetto voice, making a high-low-high-low sound. This vocal technique is used in many cultures throughout the world.

In Alpine folk music, it was probably developed in the Swiss Alps as a method of communication between mountain peaks, later becoming part of the region’s traditional music. In Persian and Azeri classical music, singers frequently use tahrir, a yodeling technique that oscillates on neighbor tones. In Georgian traditional music, yodelling takes the form of krimanchuli technique, and is used as a top part in three/four part polyphony. In Central Africa, Pygmy singers use yodels within their elaborate polyphonic singing. Yodeling is often used in American bluegrass and country music.

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If you’re not hip to Black Cab Sessions, you are in for a treat!

…if you touch me, well i just think i’ll scream
cuz it’s been so long, since someone challenged me.
and made me think… about the way things are…
made me think…about the way they could be.
i believe it- why? oh my…
ooh my lord…ooh my lord…i don’t even know why…but…

oh! this feeling it is wonderful! don’t you ever turn it off!
oh! this feeling it is wonderful! don’t you ever turn it off!

feelings…why? oh my: human needs. heartbeats.
i can see it…all. by the way you smile.
i’m smiling too! i see myself in you.
i am with it! ooh man i am wired!
ooh my lord! ooh my lord- yeah…now i really know why!

oh! this feeling it is wonderful! don’t you ever turn it off!
oh! this feeling it is wonderful! don’t you ever turn it off!

Today i say goodbye to social networking. I no longer wish to opt-in to additional consumer surveillance.

If i had an office job that bored me to tears, i would surely feel differently and continue to click my way through mob, zombie and other such mindless *wars*.

Alas, i have no such job and after a discussion about its pros and cons, it is undeniably clear that the cons ruthlessly outweigh the pros.

After using the features that Facebook provides *free* to users for the past couple of years, in all fairness it was fun to occasionally find a long, lost pal.

However, given the amount of information Facebook sells about me and anyone else who uses it, I began to think this way : “They’re making lots of money off of tracking what I spend and where and potentially using my words and images without my knowledge. Is that such a great deal for anyone else?”

To boot, I was friends with a lot of people who I never see or actually have much in common with [towards the end i actually started removing "friends"].

As for the friends i see on a regular basis, i don’t need such a tool to stay in contact with them.

So — so long, social-networking-disguised-as-data-mining-and-profiling sites!

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Now that I’ve dived earnestly back into playing music every day, I’m looking for a few good tunes to learn.

Pollee immediately suggested this jewel and not only is it a great song but very simple and thus gratifying because a fella can play it almost immediately :

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