As some of you know, I have a deep and abiding love for a cappella music. In high school, I was in a guys' quartet called The Overtones, and in college I was part of the Rice Philharmonics. I'd love to get back to it, but for now I have to content myself with singing along with the Acapodcast, my collection of recordings, and whatever I happen to find on the Internet.

Here's two things that fall into the latter category. The first is an a cappella standard given a new twist by incorporating some particularly ingenious sound effects. (The thunder is my favorite.) The second is a multi-tracking a cappella take on a classic rock song, which rarely fail to make me smile.

Enjoy (and feel free to sing along).

Go watch this video. I can wait; we’ll talk when you’re done.

This (along with other recordings of the piece) fascinates me.1 There’s a lot going on here, but what really jumps out at me is how important the possibility of failure is to so many things I do.2 I’ve been hammered on from multiple angles about this. Improv is an obvious source, but it’s hardly the only one. Group Genius talks about how we have to have room to fail in order to innovate. Scrum is big on the notion of learning from failure to improve on it. Mindset (which has a lot currency at work due to our CEO mentioning it in his monthly letter) preaches the notion that difficult obstacles are an opportunity for growth. Csikszentmihalyi says that we do our best work and achieve flow when we have high skill and a challenge equal to it. Even my friend Ryan has gotten into the act, talking about the necessity of understanding your limitations and yet not owning them.3

So yeah, this speaks to me.4 What does it say to you?

1 Thanks to Albert for the tip. Yet another cool thing from The Trappist.

2 Years ago, an ex-girlfiend of mine told me during our breakup how frustrating it was that I would never really do anything that I wasn't going to succeed at. I take this realization as a sign of how much I've grown since then.

3 And no, I haven’t yet listened to the Radiolab episode about limits, but I bet there’s something there as well.

4 So much so that I found myself wondering if I could learn to play string bass just so I could see how badly I would fail at Failing. Or succeed at failing. Or I suppose that means I would have succeeded at Failing…

Last Saturday afternoon, my friends Nancy and Albert and I were at The Trappist, a haven for Belgian beer lovers in Oakland, CA, when a convoluted chain of comments and references leading me to this post began. Nancy told me about a job interview she'd just had in Charleston, SC. Having just been doing a lot of reading about the Civil War, I made a comment about Fort Sumter. Nancy pointed out that, as a Canadian, she didn't actually know that much about the American Civil War. ("It's not my fault. We had one year of American History1 in 7th grade.") This, of course, made me think of (fellow Canadian) Robin Laws' comments on my friend Ken's The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated. It also reminded me that I'd read it but not yet talked about it. Which brings us here.

First things first: It's great. Ken manages to pack in a tremendous amount of (sometimes surprising) material into 176 pages, and Shepherd Hendrix does an amazing job of keeping up with the almost-frenetic pace. It's also laugh-out-loud funny; my guffawing and reading of occassional excerpts were enough to convince my friend James to ask to borrow it when I finished.

So here's what jumped out at me:

• Lots of Quotations. Ken is perfectly content to let history speak for itself when appropriate, and that's more often than you might think. Sure, there's a full-page spread of the Gettysburg Address, but you also get H. L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding's prose style: "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it."
• Jefferson. I don't have the page count at hand, but he might have more appearances than anyone else. (George Washington is the possible exception.) And he's a troublesome figure, given his difficulties in dealing with slavery. Or as he said: "We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
• Chicago. Ken holds that it is the greatest city in the world, and there's more than a little evidence presented here as to why.
• The slavery narrative. In many ways this is the strand that ties the book together. The last section, Tear Down This Wall, is about the Civil Rights movement as much as it about the fall of Communism. Which, I suppose, is only fitting, given where we started and how we got here.

So there you go. Need a crash course in American History and hope to have a good chuckle in the process? I know of no better book.

1 As a bonus feature, the one event in American History that Nancy (along with all other Canadians, apparently) did know a lot about was the War of 1812. She and Albert pointed me to this song by Three Dead Trolls In a Baggie which serves a reminder of the war that, as I told her, "we don't like to talk about."

I haven't been reading a lot of my Google Reader feeds lately, which is why there hasn't been a link roundup in about two months. Here, then, are the few things that have caught my eye.

• I read The Artist's Way sometime in 2008, and I used to do morning pages every day. 750 Words is a site designed to help you do them online.
• Speaking of routines, I found this collection of famous people's daily rituals interesting, if only for the number of morning people on the list.
• If it's got graphs, it must be scientific. Cake Vs. Pie: A Scientific Approach.
• Penelope Trunk struggles with her to-do list just like I do.
• A few weeks back I posted on Twitter that I wanted to be Scott Berkun when I grow up. (The job title of "freelance thinker" he gave himself in Confessions of a Public Speaker sealed the deal.) As if by magic, he posted about how he makes a living doing what he does.

And there we are. Not much, I know, but you'll have to make do.

Finally, the Things Which Are Awesome edition.

• Anyone who owns and loves their cast-iron cookware (like I do), should bone up on their seasoning technique.
• Still on the cooking front, my friend Tim Newsome wires up an Arduino control for his Alton Brown smoker.
• I just love idea of Cold War spies collecting jokes as intelligence.
• McSweeney's offers Seven Rejected Improv Troupe Scenarios, which are made so much better than the usual bad suggestions we get by the inclusion of additional, unnecessary clauses.
• You've probably seen this already, but I desperately want to perform Two Gentlemen of Lebowski.