Check Out Who's Doing Road Work in DC Now

A skeleton road crew on Massachusetts Avenue

Good Evening.

I have nothing to say about this particular bit of road work I saw on my way to Brookings today, save that I hope the dead get union wages too.

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We have our second guest booked for #DogShirtTV: BookShirts, and it’s the estimable Will Saletan of The Bulwark, who will be coming on the show on September 26 to discuss his mini-book—available for free on the Bulwark’s site and entitled, “The Corruption of Lindsey Graham: A Case Study in the Rise of Authoritarianism.”

The YouTube link is here:

The Zoom information is below the paywall.

I have some additional invitations out for other authors and will be scheduling more shows in the next few days.

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I have always been fascinated by polyphonic overtone singing, which I normally associate with the throat singers of traditional Tuvan and Mongolian music. But the YouTube algorithm fed me this video on the subject (I have no idea why) by a woman named Anna-Maria Hefele, who appears to be a polyphonic singer (yes, that means she can sing more than one note at a time) in the Western tradition. That there are such people was news to me, and her technique is, well, quite excellent.

Her introduction to polyphonic overtone singing—along with a more traditional Tuvan example of polyphonic singing—are #YourMusicOfTheDay:

How, you ask, can a person sing more than one note at the same time?

The answer is exactly the same as how you can pluck one string on a guitar or violin and produce more than one note because other strings start vibrating sympathetically along a series of notes called the overtone series. In the case of the human voice, the other things that vibrate are parts of the human body other than the vocal chords—which are busy producing the main note. In particular, the lips can be made to vibrate in overtones in a controlled fashion by people who know what they are doing.

No, I’m not making any of this up. I’m seen it done live and up close.

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Acting #BeastMaster Paul Rosensweig writes in with this little fellow today: “This is the Mwanzaa Rock lizard—named for the second largest city in Tanzania. For obvious reasons, [it’s] called the ‘Spiderman lizard.’” Today, it’s called the #BeastOfTheDay: