Gabriel Bonnin, aka Singer Sound System, plays an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy that’s driven by an old Singer sewing machine pedal.

My instrument is an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy. I just removed the crank and use a Singer machine to drive it :-) It is equipped with four integrated microphones that allow me to process the sound live, especially in Ableton Live.

Some of his most popular recent covers include the Doctor Who theme¹:

Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train:

The X-Files theme:

And Enter Sandman by Metallica:

Oh and Daft Punk!

You can find his stuff on YouTube and Instagram.

1. One commenter on Instagram remarked: “This sounds more like the Dr Who theme than the Dr who theme does”.↩

Tags: Gabriel Bonnin · music · remix · video

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‘It’s Just a Mess:’ 23 People Explain How Tariffs Have Suddenly Ruined Their Hobby. “Many small businesses overseas have stopped shipping items to the United States, and some customers say that their packages are in customs processing hell…”

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The great Ray Hudson is retiring from broadcasting. “His commentary was a gift from the gods, a shooting star from the furthest reaches of the brightest galaxy, that was only meant to rest on planet earth for a short period of time…”

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The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie; looks like another great prestige caper.

Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.

It’s coming out in “select theaters” on Nov 26 before it’s debut on Netflix Dec 12.

Tags: movies · trailers · video · Wake Up Dead Man

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Congress Plays Keep-Away With Child’s School Lunch. “‘If you want to eat, you’re going to have to jump for it!’ said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), laughing as he dangled the bag above the head of the 4-foot-tall child, who leapt in vain…”

I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education. “The dominant worldview seems to be: Why worry about actually learning anything when you can get an A for outsourcing your thinking to a machine?”

“A new volunteer-led organization called Grandparents for Vaccines launched Sunday on National Grandparents Day with a mission to share firsthand experiences of life before vaccines were widely available.”

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Zohran Mamdani’s social media team is operating on all cylinders: A Dramatic Reading of The New York Times: How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor? Read by “Railroad Daddy” Morgan Spector.

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How a Deaf Quarterback Changed Sports Forever By Inventing the Huddle. “Concerned that his hand signs were tipping off his plans to the opposing defense, Hubbard summoned his offense and directed them to form a circle around him…”

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The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card, From Versailles to Microsoft Word. “They’re a precursor and a stake in the ground; the cart before the horse and the name before the face.”

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Watch a man named Ozzie make rope using a very simple hand-cranked machine. The real magic happens starting at about the 12-minute mark, where the three strands of the rope come together — my mouth actually fell open at this point. It’s amazing what you can do with just a simple machine that cleverly leverages the laws of physics and the material’s own properties.

You can order one of these rope making machines from Etsy.

See also How Rope Was Made the Old Fashioned Way, i.e. how rope was made in Edwardian England. (via book of joe)

Tags: how to · video

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49 Literary Movies and TV Shows to Watch This Fall. That seems like a lot! Includes Frankenstein, The Twits (Roald Dahl), various Seuss stories, The Running Man, Train Dreams, Hamnet, etc.

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Whoa, I have not watched this documentary in a loooong time — very interesting to watch in the future this company helped to create, for good and very, very bad. Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers N...

USGS Unveils New National Geologic Map. “In a significant advancement for geoscience, the U.S. Geological Survey has released the most detailed national-scale geologic map of the country to date.”

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This is the trailer for a documentary celebrating the life and work of actor & comedian John Candy.

I loved John Candy; how could you not? Uncle Buck was my favorite of his movies. I can’t believe he died more than 20 years ago already. (via craig mod)

Tags: John Candy · John Candy: I Like Me · movies · trailers · video

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Yesterday, Jackson Goldstone won the 2025 Downhill Mountain ike World Championship. Here’s the POV of his winning run down the *very* steep course in Champéry, Switzerland. (This is *bananas*!)

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Forthcoming book by Bernie Sanders: Fight Oligarchy. “Sanders explains how the United States today is an oligarchic society in which a small handful of multibillionaires exercise enormous economic and political power.”

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Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’.

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Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children. “Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other states may follow.”

How Are You Supposed To Get The COVID Vaccine Now? An Explainer. “If you are not in one of the 16-ish states requiring a prescription for a COVID vaccine, you should be able to self-report a condition and receive your vaccine.”

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In the aftermath of the 2016 election, British American artist Jo Hay began a series of engaging portraits called Persisters “that depict contemporary, trailblazing women in pursuit of civil rights and justice”. Pictured above are her paintings of Letitia James, Elizabeth Warren, Greta Thunberg, Christine Blasey Ford, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Marie Yovanovitch. The portraits are quite large, as you can see in this photo of AOC’s painting.

I also quite like Hay’s other portraits, including this poignant one of Anne Frank.

Tags: art · Jo Hay · politics

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“I almost admire the confidence it must take to tell people what to do online. But I long for the days when the internet wasn’t just lists of bossy self-optimisation plans.”

Shane Schieffer is attempting to swim the entire 140-mile length of Lake Powell in 10 days, self-supported. Yeah, that means he’s dragging 215lbs of gear behind him on a paddle board while he swims. He’s documenting the whole thing on Instagram; here’s a video where he exp...

The Rise of the Traveling Third Space. “Traveling third spaces are not physically fixed; they move across cafes, malls, restaurants, and host various programming for a singular community in a particular city.”

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Lucasfilm recently released an official map of the galaxy that Star Wars takes place in. And it’s huge.

The map is slightly interactive; you can zoom and scroll it, but you can’t search or, say, click to highlight all the star systems featured in Andor. But you can do manual lookups using this massive 59-page PDF listing of Star Wars star systems.

Tags: maps · Star Wars

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A thoughtful essay about e-bikes as a metaphor for AI, augmentation vs amputation, and the bargain of innovation. “We often consider what technology promises to enable for us, without considering what it will almost certainly disable.”

From Lewis Hine, a photograph of Clyde Bradford. Hine’s photos of child laborers resulted in some of the first laws in the US against child labor.

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In 1987, choir director Dennis Bell arranged a version of U2’s #1 hit I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For for his choir, the New Voices of Freedom. After hearing a recording of the arrangement, U2 asked Bell & the choir to join the band for an upcoming show at Mad...

A list of 29 heroes and interesting people that few people have heard of. I’ve only heard of one or two of these folks.

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The Baltimore Museum of Art is exhibiting Amy Sherald’s American Sublime show after Sherald pulled it from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery due to attempted censorship. I saw this in NYC; it’s fantastic.

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