A real mechanical sense

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jack White - labeled by The New York Times as "the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time" - on LPs: "I was talking to Robert Altman before he died, and I asked him about an interview where he said that he would never switch to videotape, that he would always stay in film. He said: 'I know what that is. It has a negative. It has a positive. With videotape or digital, I have no idea what's going on.' That's how I feel about vinyl. The left wall is the left channel, the right wall is the right channel, and you're just dragging that rock through the groove. Watching it spin, you get a real mechanical sense of music being reproduced."

And so from the founder of the White Stripes to the recipient of an Easter basket. Today Cleo excitedly pawed through the contents of a wonderful basket from her grandparents - and, in the process, spent about a minute trying to figure out how to open a small pie tin and tart mold, both of which were wrapped in a plastic sleeve. No easy task, as it turned out, and in the end we had to turn to scissors. But what I like about the following video is the clarity and patience of thought on display: she looks; her hands move almost unthinkingly; she considers another angle. The right half of the brain is connected to the left, and you just drag new ideas through the entire organ. And in the process, give a real mechanical sense of how thought and learning unfold: