Mousetrap - 74

In their own words
The South Asian Literary Recordings Project
Whoop-di-doo! Just right to fill in those gaps in my iPod. If you’re an admirer of fine writing, and, by extension, of its exponents, you’ll love this. Brainchild of the USA’s Library of Congress Delhi office, it was set up to celebrate the LoC’s overseas bicentennial. It features well-loved authors reading from their own writing. You’ll find Mulk Raj Anand, Faiz, Kaifi Azmi, Keki Daruwalla, a certain A B Vajpayee (as a poet, not a speechmaker, thankfully) and many, many others, over eighty of them in all, in recordings ranging from 30 to 60 minutes long, in 22 languages from all over the region. Warts and all—accents, mistakes stumbles, and the more endearing for that. And yes, all available free, in Real Audio, and the more friendly MP3 format. Bliss.

The world’s longest Fw:
Yahoo! Time Capsule
I stand accused of featuring way too many Google products. To which I say, hey, they do a lot of cool stuff! (Yeah, yeah, okay, we’re a G-roupie.) Anyway, to prove our secular credentials, here’s a cool Yahoo project. Caveat: you’ll need a Yahoo ID. Up to the 8th November, you can contribute images, text, audio, video—from your personal archive or created specially for this—to one of the categories of what they call an electronic anthropology project. They say it’s “the first time that digital data will be gathered and preserved for historical purposes.” (I think not. I recall several others, one of which I featured here.) These contributions will be handed into the care of the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Star treatment
Anousheh Ansari Space Blog
A few weeks ago, the world’s first female space tourist (as in, not somone who had qualified as an astronaut, but paid her way with lots of money) took off in a Russian spacecraft and spent time at the International Space Station. And, as seems inevitable these days, she blogged it all. As with her little jaunt, she had help with the blog, but there is a lot of stuff she’s written. There’s also a Flickr photo set and her personal site. Go relive the journey with her.

Boom
The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products
A little bonus for cartoon fans. Remember the Roadrunner cartoons? And how Wile E Coyote always seemed to get clobbered / burned / flattened by stuff with an “ACME” brand name? Well, this fan has curated a comprehensive set of them. Enjoy.


Reader suggestions welcome, and will be acknowledged. Go to http://o3.indiatimes.com/mousetrap for past columns, and to comment, or mail inthemousetrap@indiatimes.com. The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com.

Published in the Times of India, Mumbai edition, 15th October, 2006.

Tags: The Times of India, Mousetrap