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How’s that for Richardsonian Romanesque?

Northwestern University

At the Art Institute of Chicago.

As the name implies, Fiskfélagið is mostly known as a seafood restaurant. But their presentation of this lamb dish deserves note. The vapor is caused by cauliflower, which has been prepared in liquid nitrogen and is thus quite cold when it’s spooned onto the lamb. The full description is:

Grilled Leg of Lamb in Herbs, Smoked Loin of Lamb with Red Onion & Plum Tomato, Cauliflower Purée, Button Mushroom & Rosmarin Birch Sauce. From Kvelduhverfi.

Great find at an antique store in Reykjavík, just down the street from where I’m staying:

The fantastic thing about Icelandic typewrites is that they contain all the glyphs necessary for reproducing North Germanic languages:

The four pangrams above use all of the letters for Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, respectively.

A little north of Dowagiac, in southwestern Michigan, a group of horses ambles over to gaze at the people in a neighboring field:

Talking about “original” or “indigenous” musical instruments in Iceland is tricky. Unlike the continental Scandinavian countries, there’s little evidence of medieval musical culture — far fewer paintings, wood or stone carvings, that depict actual instruments. In fact, the earliest depiction of the national instrument, the Langspil (a bowed zither) is from 1836 — and from a French travel narrative, no less:

Twenty years later, the first signifiant work on the Langspil was published, a guidebook on how to play:

At its most basic, the Langspil is a variant of the instrument Americans know as a Dulcimer. Such instruments, which can all fall under the general term Zither, have a long history in Europe. A large part of the original settlement of Iceland came from Norway, and a zither known as the Langeleik are pretty well-attested there — the earliest surviving from the 16th century. (I’m not sure whether the current thinking is that the Langeleik/Langspil travelled with the Norwegians during the 9th century settlement period or much later.)

Regardless, we can probably treat the Icelandic Langspil as a local adaptation of a common European instrument class. In the engraving above from 1836, we see a farmer playing the instrument with a bow, instead of plucking with fingers or a pick. In modern instruments being produced today, both methods are supported. Sometimes the practice is to unhook one of two larger strings when bowing, reconnecting it when the player wants to use a pick. Below, a researcher plucks various strings while holding some of them down against the fretboard:

Of course, there’s a slippery slope between the specifically-Icelandic Langspil, and any zither produced in Iceland. Is the difference in the shape of the instrument, or its ability to be bowed, or the decoration carved or painted onto its surface? Below, an uncle-and-nephew team of Icelandic instrument makers consider a conventional zither, left, and a Langspil, right:

Both were made in Reykjavík in 2011, and both can be strung and played in a similar fashion. Besides the physical difference in the bodies’ design, the placement of the fretboard on the Langspil is different. But in general, as with all folk instruments, individual examples exist in a spectrum of different design choices and stylistic traditions, rather than inhabiting fixed positions such as Violin/Viola/Cello.

If you’re in Reykjavík in December you spend most of your time trying to photograph the sky, which gets really interesting around sunrise and sunset. The picture above is from about 2:30pm local time, and you can see the orange glow of the setting sun in some of the buildings’ windows.

The church at the top of the hill is Hallgrímskirkja, which was under continual construction from the late 1930s through the 1980s.

The National & University Library of Iceland rests on a field of snow. The sun has mostly set here by 4:30pm.

Who amongst us isn’t in the market for a Langspil — an Icelandic bowed zither? These Langspils were for sale in a store in central Reykjavík; they run the gamut from diatonic to chromatic, four-string to three-string.

I spent the 3rd weekend in September out in Lombard, Illinois, at the 6th annual Vintage Computer Festival Midwest. Highlights included a great collection of Bulgarian off-brand Apple ][ clones:

Kids were entranced by a collection of machines based on the 6502 chip:

A rare Canon object.station running its native NeXTStep 3.3 OS:

Rarest of all was a functioning Apple 1:

The show was probably one of the only places you could see an Apple 1, ][ and /// all sitting on the same table working at the same time. Or at least, the Apple /// was working for a little while:

Then this happened:

Apple /// power supplies are infamous for blowing a capacitor — or three. Luckily Mike Lee, owner of this particular ///, had reading materials all ready to go:

Between the Kaypros and the Sun you should be just able to glimpse an Osborne 1:

Computer historian David Greelish recorded a podcast together with Bill Degnan, from the Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists:

One of the great things about VCFMW is that it gives you time to sit down with older machines and really try to use them. Even in ways their original owners never did: did anyone who had an Atari 400 ever try to type anything out on this awful chiclet keyboard?:

We also had a whole table dedicated to Rockwell R6500 machines:

Towards the end of the show we were playing around with Newton emulation on modern Android tablet hardware: