Wednesday Roundup: Jazz, Holiday Cards and the New Soda Bottle

Test Your Jazz Chops: Smithsonian Folkways just announced their forthcoming Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology, which will be available beginning March 29. The collection features 111 songs on six CD's that chronicle the history of jazz music, focusing on its most notable innovators and styles, from bebop to free jazz. Folkways is offering a quiz through Sporcle.com, where you can listen to samples of tracks and attempt to identify songs on the anthology. There is a shorter, 25-song version available, but in order to guess the full song list of all six discs, take the longer, 111-song quiz.

Crafty Cards: A few days ago, local artist Thalia Doukas facilitated a holiday card-making workshop at the Postal Museum. If you weren't able to attend, Pushing the Envelope has posted some of her most salient tips on how to make some very worldly, one of a kind cards for the holidays using stamps as a primary decoration. There are also photos to get the imagination flowing.

Peanut Butter and Jellyfish: In Smithsonian's 40th anniversary issue this past August, our colleague Abigail Tucker wrote about the proliferation of jellyfish in the earth's oceans. The Ocean Portal blog recently explained why jellyfish populations are exploding, citing overfishing as a primary cause. Over 120 species of fish and over 30 other ocean-bound species feed on jellyfish, and if those populations are overfished, the jellyfish can get out of control. The blog suggests that if fish become a scarcity, we may indeed be stuck eating jellyfish instead.

Twenty-First Century Soda Bottle? Recently on the Cooper-Hewitt's Design Blog, an unlikely combination of ingredients is being tested in an attempt to make a new, eco-friendly soda bottle. French designer Francois Azambourg is teaming up with Harvard professor of bioengineering Donald Ingber to test a mixture of sea fungus and sodium chloride bath as a possible substitute to the plastic that is accumulating in our oceans in piles like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The duo is using a sausage-making contraption to shape the bottles into a teardrop shape. Word is that the bottles are even healthy enough to eat—whether or not they're tasty is, of course, another story.

Jess Righthand | | READ MORE

Jess Righthand is a former editorial intern at Smithsonian. She writes about music, theater, movies and the arts.