MAGIC NUMBERS

Recently “renewed”, the Classical Composers Database is an excellent starting point for those curious about classical music figures. New features include the regularly updated news items and “composers calendar”, with birthdays and dying days, as well as events for every day or month of the year. For example, March 11 is the anniversary of Irving Berlin’s birth and the 1867 premiere of Verdi’s Don Carlos.

Equally handy are the “latest changes” and “best visited” side menus, the latter showing that the superlative entry on Mozart and its full Kochel catalogue is three times more popular than Vivaldi’s, which is the next.

www.classical-composers.org

SUPERHERO WORSHIP

The countdown clock on the front page of the Blue Tights Adventure Network! website tells us that we have only to wait about three-and-a-half months until we are able to see Bryan Singer’s vision of that most iconic of comic book heroes, Superman. There are 27 video journal entries from the director himself covering the production of Superman Returns, and the Fan Art Gallery, as expected, can be both disturbing and worthy of admiration in its love for the Man of Steel. This fansite has also offered “an Exclusive First look!” at the video game version of the film, and, naturally, the news and community forums are scenes of (too) much busy speculation.

www.bluetights.net

KNIT WITS

Guerrilla knitting is ready to become the next in-thing. Eschewing the antisocial aerosol can, Knitta began in 2005 when AKrylik and PolyCotN aired their frustration over unfinished projects such as half-knitted sweaters. Then, as their website states: “That very afternoon they knitted their first doorknob cozy.” It was their eureka moment. A “tag crew” of ten lady knitters was formed to bomb the American inner city with “vibrant, stitched works of art, wrapped around everything from beer bottles . . . to public monuments and utility poles”. You can see their quite heartwarming work on their site, and they have a MySpace.com page, too.

www.knittaplease.com

www.myspace.com/knittaplease

PODCAST OF THE WEEK

Being the first to stake out a niche is often the key to gaining popularity as a podcast, but it also helps to be entertaining. The Podopera podcast has gained a large number of fans — enough for them to get new service providers who can give them the bandwidth that they and their listeners need — by paying heed to its motto “opera has never been so much fun!” You can expect content such as their exclusive interview with Katarina Karnéus about her role as Xerxes at the ENO, as well as other chats with the chick-lit author Zoë Barnes about her double life as a singer, and Gilbert & Sullivan special shows and reports on live opera in Trafalgar Square.

www.podopera.libsyn.com

BLOG OF THE WEEK

Franz Ferdinand are exactly the kind of band that should have a blog. Literate, knowing and a bit arch, aren’t they? Perfect. Well, they have one on their official website. In fact, there are individual blogs from Alex, Nick, Bob and Paul, and a generic band blog, too. These are more journal-type blogs than ones that will link you to whatever webpage has piqued their interest lately, but, in truth, all music fans want is the band going on about how wonderful the Brazilian city of São Paulo is: Nick calls it “industrial, dirty and full of life, just the way I like it”. You can also read how Alex copes with the peculiar travails of having too many fans (20,000 questions for a webchat in ten minutes) and being described as “living in fear” of an abusive prostitute by tabloid gossip-mongers when he actually feels fine.

www.franzferdinand.co.uk/blog.php