Own Bob Dylan's Hand-Written 'Mr. Tambourine Man' Lyrics
[Three progressive drafts of Mr. Tambourine Man lyrics are among the Bob Dylan items up for auction Saturday.]
Long Guardian story short: Pictured above, they'll be sold at auction this coming Saturday, January 18, 2025.
Here's the Guardian article:
'What's going on in Bob Dylan's head: Mr. Tambourine Man lyrics up for auction
Rare drafts of one of Dylan's best known songs found in a journalist's archive could fetch up to $1 million as part of wider legacy sale
In March 1964, the rock journalist Al Aronowitz awoke to find Dylan asleep on his sofa and the lyrics to Mr. Tambourine Man crumpled up in his rubbish bin.
The 22-year-old Dylan had spent the night writing and rewriting his new song on a portable typewriter at Aronowitz’s home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, before chucking away the early drafts and stretching out on his friend's couch.
Now, Dylan's stained, crumpled and partially torn lyrics — which Aronowitz rescued from his trash can that morning and passed on to his children when he died in 2005 — could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are sold at auction on Saturday.
"My father never threw anything away, and we knew the story of Mr. Tambourine Man... but he had lost track of it," said Myles Aronowitz, who unearthed the lyrics last year after spending three years looking through 250 boxes of his father's papers, photographs, and audio tapes. "It meant a lot to him, but he didn't know where it was."
The three drafts of the song in Aronowitz's archive reveal that Dylan substituted words like "bootheels" for "feet" and "magic” for "priceless". He also deleted and shortened lines, and inserted new verses into later drafts.
"It feels like there's a stream of consciousness there — but you can also see from the drafts how carefully each word was crafted," said Myles.
Being able to see the words Dylan crossed out and inserted on the manuscript is like being able to look over the artist's shoulder as he is writing the song, he said. "It gives you a feeling for what was going on in Bob Dylan's head."
Al Aronowitz had already made a name for himself as a journalist by writing about Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac when he was assigned to interview Dylan in 1963. After the two men became friends, Aronowitz introduced Ginsberg to Dylan and Dylan to the Beatles. "He brokered that meeting and brought some marijuana," said Myles. He believes members of the Beatles then tried the drug for the first time.
In March 1964, the Aronowitz family home was a "safe haven" for Dylan, who had recently broken up with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo.
"He was licking his wounds," said Laura Woolley, managing director at Julien's Auctions, which is selling the lyrics. "And he just threw himself into his work."
Aronowitz later recalled how Dylan had sat typing that night at "my white Formica breakfast bar in a swirl of chain-lit Camels cigarette smoke, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping the words out... while the whole time, over and over again, Marvin Gaye sang 'Can I Get A Witness' from the six-foot speakers of my hi-fi in the room next to where he was, with Bob getting up from the typewriter each time the record finished in order to put the needle back at the start".
Woolley thinks it's likely Dylan had jotted down some notes for the song lyrics by hand a few weeks earlier, when he had experienced Mardi Gras in New Orleans for the first time. "I believe our first draft is basically a typed version of a lot of those notes — he was taking the thoughts and the ideas that were dancing around in his head and getting them down."
The lyrics appear to have been written quickly, with vernacular spelling ("tho you might hear laughin spinnin swingin madly thru the sun") and the word "to" repeatedly abbreviated to "t". But they also reveal how hard Dylan worked to find the right words that night: "He is constantly in search for perfection, on some level, of things having the right ring and sound," said Woolley.
"No one will ever know how Dylan came up with some of these lines. And I think it makes him human that not everything he wrote just poured out of him. He really did have to work on this one."
The auction house has officially estimated the lyrics will sell for $400,000 to $600,000.
Also on sale are 50 other items from Aronowitz's personal archive, including an early oil painting by Dylan from 1968 (valued at $200,000 to $300,000), a 1963 handbill from Dylan's first major headline performance, at Town Hall in New York City, and vintage photos.
Introducing the Ramen Spork, a unique utensil conceived to enhance the practicality and enjoyment of consuming ramen.
Born out of a collaboration with a renowned Japanese noodle restaurant chain, this all-in-one tool aims to tackle the challenge of waste reduction by replacing disposable chopsticks.
Its dual functionality allows you to seamlessly ladle soup as well as twist noodles, making it easier to savor every nuance of your ramen.
Crafted for durability and convenience, this piece merges tradition with sustainability, offering a fuss-free way to appreciate the complex flavors of ramen in one mouthful.
Q. I have read that white button mushrooms taste better if they are just past their prime. Is this true?
A. Freshly harvested white button mushrooms have firm caps, stems and gills that are free of dark spots. That said, some chefs advocate the use of slightly older, blemished mushrooms, claiming that they are more flavorful than pristine, ultra-fresh specimens. To test this claim for ourselves, we sautéed two batches of mushrooms, one fresh from the supermarket and one showing signs of age after a week in the refrigerator. In a side-by-side comparison, the results surprised us. Tasters found that the older mushrooms actually had a deeper,, earthier flavor and were substanstially more "mushroomy" than the unblemished samples. This is likely because some moisture had evaporated and flavors were more concentrated.
The takeaway: There's no need to discard old mushrooms. In fact, their imperfections may actually improve the flavor of your dish. Do not, however, use mushrooms that smell fermented or look slimy.
Am I the only one who noticed something different about the look of boj yesterday?
I thought maybe someone had spiked my tea with LSD last evening while I was busy as a one-armed paperhanger getting today's posts ready.
I kept looking at my computer and I knew something was different but I couldn't put my finger on it.
I kept working and then the penny dropped: instead of links being in boldface and underlined as has been the case since Day 1 in 2004 (below)
they were in boldface only (top).
This does make the sidebar look less cluttered and more streamlined and modern but it eliminates the conventional sign of a clickable link: since everything's in boldface, nothing's in boldface as there's no contrasting font.
Links in the body of the blog's text — also without the underline — are less discoverable as well.
Note that I had nothing to do with this change: it came from the Typepad skunkworks.
Nor did I get a heads-up or alert from Typepad about this update, which is pretty much par for the course.
Designed for observation of root systems, the In-Situ Root Imager is a minirhizotron system that captures non-destructive, high-resolution digital images of root systems underground.
Use the images to observe the development of root systems over time; track the establishment of new crops throughout the growing season; detect and diagnose plant pathogens and disorders before changes are visible above ground; and time fertilizer application.
The system consists of the In-Situ Root Imager, transparent acrylic tubes which are installed in the ground, an included tablet computer, and the free RootSnap! Analysis Software.
After selecting the site (or sites) that you plan to evaluate, install the transparent tubes in the ground.
Insert the end of the tube with the watertight plug into the soil.
The end of the tube which is above the ground features an insulated removable cap.
Allow soil and any established plant roots to settle around the tubes over the course of a few days to a few months.
The plant roots will then grow around each transparent tube, and any roots and soil touching the tube's exterior will be imaged by the system.
Tubes can be used in multiple locations of your experimental plot; simply take the imager to each location where tubes have been installed.
To begin scanning, lower the imager down into the transparent tube.
Using the included tablet computer, select the desired image resolution and take scans at various depths.
Rotating the scanner in the tube produces live-updating 360° images of the surrounding roots and soil.
The collected images can be analyzed using RootSnap! software which calculates root parameters such as length, area, volume, diameter, and branching angle.
The In-Situ Root Imager is capable of producing images of up to 23.5 million pixels with a scan resolution of up to 600 DPI.
The imager's linear scanning system creates no image distortion, ensuring scan accuracy.
The tubes are extremely durable and can last up to 10 years in certain environments, allowing roots to be analyzed over multiple growing seasons.
Included: In-Situ Root Imager, tablet computer, 6 soil tubes with insulated watertight caps, calibration tube, USB cable, collapsible slider rod with tube cap, Allen Wrench, and carrying case.
[Brachycephalus dacnis, the second-smallest species of vertebrate on the planet, was discovered in southeastern Brazil and measures less than 0.7 centimeters long. Credit: Lucas Botelho]
Above, the headline of a New York Times story heralding the discovery of the second-smallest vertebrate known to exist on our planet.
[Brachycephalus dacnis sings like a cricket and does not have tadpoles.Credit: Lucas Botelho]
From the Times article:
"We are talking about the limits of life size on Earth," said Luís Felipe Toledo, a herpetologist at the University of Campinas in Brazil.
Brazil's Atlantic forest has many frogs of the Brachycephalus genus, which are known also as saddleback toads. Their penchant for springing around and leaping distances about 30 times their body length has led to the nickname "flea toadlets."
"There are untold numbers of unknown tiny frogs out there," says Mark Scherz, curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who was not involved in this study. He added that "these small species have been overlooked previously, by virtue of how hard they can be to find and collect."
Dr. Toledo's team also ran specialized high-resolution CT scans on the toadlet to uncover more about the inner workings of how a frog could still be a frog when it is this miniaturized.
While frogs usually have four fingers on their hands and five on their feet, B. dacnis, like other miniature frogs, has two fingers on its hands and three on its feet. Parts of its inner ears are missing too.
While miniaturization makes these frogs vulnerable to tiny predators, like ants and spiders, the trade-off seems worth it from an evolutionary perspective, said Jodi Rowley, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Australian Museum, who was not involved in the study.
"Miniaturization allows frogs to live in a whole new world that larger frogs simply can't get into," Dr. Rowley said, like thick leaf litter. In addition to providing shelter from predators, such spaces "are full of very tiny food that bigger frogs can't take advantage of."
Given that the Brazilian Atlantic forest has been severely deforested, learning more about these tiny frogs aids their conservation.
"So much of our biodiversity, known and unknown, is small and camouflaged and, not surprisingly, often goes unnoticed," Dr. Rowley said.
One more thing: don't EVER get your heating/cooling/ventilation ducts cleaned.
I fell for this scam soon after I moved into my then 16-year-old house only to find that I'd dropped a significant chunk of change for a procedure that totally inconvenienced me for a day as I was told to vacate the premises while the duct cleaners took stuff apart and did what they do.
After the cleaning, the noise from the duct system was unbelievably loud and irritating, as all the long settled-into-place duct system joints throughout the house had been disturbed from their years-long slumber and now jiggled and rattled against each other.
It took years for things to get back to normal.
Don't worry about dust and stuff that's accumulated in your uncleaned ducts: by now it's settled into place and isn't going anywhere while doing a great job sealing the connections.
The Missouri Marmite Museum celebrates the world's most famous love-it/hate-it item: a yeast extract made from the dregs found at the bottom of British beer barrels, and sold in adorable brown glass jars.
The museum's collection began with one metal-top jar purchased in 1974; today the collection is a broad spectrum of plastic-top jars, toy trucks, cookbooks, stuffed animals, thimbles, toast racks, advertisements, and wearing apparel: socks, t-shirts, aprons, and sweatshirts.
Parts of the collection come from India, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, England, Sri Lanka, Canada, and Hong Kong — with the oldest item (1930's) having been excavated from a rubbish dump in Wales.
The Missouri Marmite Museum, located in Valley Park, Missouri, is open by appointment only. Be sure to ask for a private screening of our exclusive video of Dr. Marmite's appearance at the Museum's opening ceremonies.
You can email the Museum Curator (Doug Schneider) at [email protected].
"The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite: An Anecdotal A-Z of 'Tar-in-a-Jar,'" is just the ticket for Marmite aficionados.
Below,
former Daily Mirror tabloid reporter Hall with her fixation.
Washington Post columnist John Kelly described Marmite as follows: "Imagine putting hundreds of anchovies in a blender, adding salt and axle grease, pureeing, pouring the contents on an asphalt roofing shingle, baking under a hot sun for several weeks, then scraping off a black, gooey precipitate and eating it. That is Marmite."
Designed by Marc Newson, Swarovski Optik's AX Visio binoculars are equipped with artificial intelligence so they can identify bird and animal species. Swarovski Optik — the segment of the Swarovski group dedicated to sports optics such as binoculars and rifle scopes — said it considers AX Visio to be the world's first smart binoculars, capable of identifying some 9,000 species of birds and wildlife in real time. It targets mainly birdwatchers but also hunters with the invention, which has an augmented reality display so users can see species information overlaid on the image in front of them, and don't need to look away to consult a book, phone or friend.
Users turn a digital camera-like dial to the bird or mammal identification mode to enable the feature and click a button to begin identification. The AX Visio also includes a camera for taking photos and videos and a "share discoveries" mode that lets users mark the location of an item of interest before passing the binoculars to another person. Without the digital features switched on, the AX Visio still functions as a set of analogue binoculars, and there is an extra lens in between the usual two objective lenses to enable the digital functions.
"The AX Visio's added value for users consists of a real viewing experience that is enhanced with digital input," said Swarovski Optik chief technology and operations officer Andreas Gerk. In an interview on the Swarovski Optik website, industrial designer Newson said that it had been special to work on a product that was the first of its kind and that integrating all of the technology — including augmented reality, Bluetooth, GPS and a camera — inside the small package had been a challenge." It's rare for a designer to work on something that is the first product within a category, which is naturally exciting and suffice to say, challenging," said Newson. "Binoculars are traditionally solely analogue objects, which, while compelling and 'future proof', are essentially bi-dimensional."
"The AX Visio belongs to a different typology, and one that is totally new in the combination of optics and technology," he added. "Similar to a modern camera, they are optical, electronic and digital."The AX Visio is Newson's second product for Swarovski Optik following the CL Curio, a compact pair of traditional binoculars. AX Visio has a similar extruded aluminum bridge and focus wheel placement as that design. Newson said he aimed for the AX Visio to be "intuitive, modern and crucially, comfortable in the hand and on the eye", while also having a bit of personality. "I wanted them to feel approachable and usable," he said. "The inclination when designing high-performance items tends for them to be purposefully complex, and I was hoping to create something that was the opposite — intuitive and inviting."
"The three-scope construction is an obvious visual departure from other binoculars, and this encompasses the solid hinge and bridge detail, joining the dots between the three lenses," he continued. "This structure took a significant amount of time to rationalize — and manufacturing expertise to realise."The AX Visio are designed to be repairable and able to be taken apart, which Svarovski Optik says is standard for its brand, and that future updates will be available through the companion app so that the product's life cycle will be "many years". It also has an open programming interface and welcomes external providers to develop new functionalities for the binoculars.
The data and part of the AI model for bird identification came from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a research institute that publishes the Merlin Bird ID app. The integration into the device was handled in house at Swarovski Optik.
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