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Friday, October 6th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | The Hummingbird Whisperer: Meet the UCLA Scientist Who Has Befriended 200 Hummingbirds
Common wisdom, and indelible memories of The Birds, warn that feeding seagulls, pigeons and other creatures who travel in flocks is a can of worms best left unopened. But what about hummingbirds? Melanie Barboni is research geochemist in UCLA’s Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. Near the UCLA Court of Sciences she took a break from volcanos and the moon long enough to hang a feeder filled with sugar water outside her ground floor office window. This complimentary buffet proved such a hit, she hung up more. Two years later, Barboni is serving a colony of over 200 hummingbirds from four 80-ounce feeders. Their metabolism requires them to consume 8 to 10 times their body weight on a daily basis. Barboni’s service to her tiny jewel-toned friends extends well beyond the feeders. She’s diverted campus tree trimmers from interfering with them during nesting season, and given public talks on the habitat-destroying effects of climate change. She’s collaborating with another professor and UCLA’s Chief Sustainability Officer Nurit Katz to establish a special garden on campus for hummingbirds and their fellow pollinators. The intimacy of this relationship is something she’s dreamed of since her birdwatching childhood in Switzerland where the only hummingbirds available for her viewing were the ones in books. Her dream came true when a fellowship took her from Princeton to Los Angeles, where hummingbirds live year-round. Some longtime favorites now perch on their benefactor’s hand while feeding, or even permit themselves to be held and stroked. A few like to hang out inside the office, where the warm glow of Barboni’s computer monitor is a comforting presence on inclement days. She’s bestowed names on at least 50: Squeak, Stardust, Tiny, Shy… (Show of hands from those who wish she’d named them all after noted geologists: Mary Anning, Eugene Merle Shoemaker, Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin...) Get to know the UCLA hummingbirds better through Melanie Barboni’s up-close-and-personal documentary photos. Learn more about the species itself through the National Geographic documentary below.
Related Content: Cornell Launches Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Animal Sounds, with Recordings Going Back to 1929 Free Entertainment for Cats and Dogs: Videos of Birds, Squirrels & Other Thrills Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. The Hummingbird Whisperer: Meet the UCLA Scientist Who Has Befriended 200 Hummingbirds is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 8:00a | Tom Petty Takes You Inside His Songwriting Craft
Briefly noted: Give this wide-ranging interview with Tom Petty some time. Recorded in 2014, Petty talks with interviewer Jian Ghomeshi about his songwriting craft. The writing of songs, the rehearsal and recording process, the work in the studio, it all gets covered here. As he talks, one thing comes across: Whatever talents he had, Petty put in the hard work. He and the Heartbreakers mastered their instruments, kept getting better, and didn't take short cuts, to the point where they could do magical things together in the recording studio. Watch Part 1 above, and Part 2 below, where, at one point he says, "I'm doing the best I can. You can't say I didn't try really hard because I'm really trying hard to be good." The value of trying--trying consistently--can never be understated.
Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Prince, Joined by Tom Petty, Plays a Mind-Blowing Guitar Solo On “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Tom Petty Takes You Inside His Songwriting Craft is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 5:00p | Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Other Great Works by Shakespeare, Dante & Coleridge
Would Benedict Cumberbatch have such ardent fans if he couldn't read poetry so well? Almost certainly he would, although his way with verse still seems not like a bonus but an integral component of his dramatic persona. Though not easily explained, that relationship does come across if you hear any of the actor's readings of poetry. In the video above, Cumberbatch performs "Ode to a Nightingale," the longest and best-known of John Keats' 1819 odes that casts into verse the poet's discovery of "negative capability," or as he defined it in a letter two years earlier, "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
Yet one senses that the Cumberbatch fans who put up these videos, such as the one accompanying "Ode to a Nightingale" with imagery reminiscent of a Tiger Beat pictorial, care less about his negative capability than certain other qualities. His voice, for instance: the uploader of the video combining five poems just above describes as "the velvety dulcet tones of a jaguar hiding in a cello." That compilation includes "Ode to a Nightingale" as well as Shakespeare's "The Seven Ages of Man" ("All the world's a stage"), Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," a piece of Dante's Divine Comedy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." With Coleridge's dream of Asia and Dante's Italian vision of the afterlife, this poetic mix does get more exotic than it might seem (at least by the standards of the eras from which it draws). But Cumberbatch, who in 2015 received the honor of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire from the Queen and even read at the reburial ceremony of King Richard III, clearly matches best with the canon of his native England. As a versatile performer, and thus one who presumably understands all about the need for negative capability, Cumberbatch and his cello-hidden jaguar delivery (a poetic description, in its own way) has done justice in the past to Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, and Moby-Dick. Still, one wonders what poem Cumberbatch could perform in order to achieve an unsurpassable state of peak Englishness. How long could it take for him to get around, for instance, to "If—"? Cumberbatch's reading of "Ode" will be added to our collection, 900 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Related Content: F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare’s Othello and Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (1940) Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner Animated: A Classic Version Narrated by Orson Welles Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Other Great Works by Shakespeare, Dante & Coleridge is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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