Dave Garrett

It's a wonderful book. Rodrigues was said to have the most comprehensive bossa nova collection in private hands, and it was that collection that formed the basis for the book. He passed away in 2010. If memory serves (it's been a while since I looked through it), although there are some covers depicting the well-worn tropes you mention, in general the cover selection is more diverse than you might think. I enjoyed it and found it to be a nice companion to my other album cover books, but my expectations may have been adjusted by the fact that the book was heavily discounted from the cover price. Your mileage may vary.

FWIW, it is currently on sale at Sleepy Night's site for $5.99. Shipping for me was $5 for a total of $10.99. Not sure if this is some sort of limited-time Black Friday/Cyber Monday deal, so those interested would do well to strike while the iron is hot.

I have several of the ones mentioned previously: Blue Note, Blue Note 2, California Cool, New York Hot, Jazz West Coast, Jazzical Moods, Jazz Album Covers: The Rare and the Beautiful, and the Concord book on Prestige Records. Never did get around to getting Daver's Jazz Graphics book on David Stone Martin covers, as I've yet to find one at what I'd consider a reasonable price. Also have one that's in a similar oversized paperback format as most of the above called Vinyl Hayride, featuring country music album covers: and this one: There's a beautiful book covering Bossa Nova album covers that was discussed here previously (http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?/topic/17547-bossa-nova-e-outras-bossas/), but it's very difficult to find a copy now. I lucked into one that Strand listed online about ten years ago and haven't seen another one since.

"Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West" sounds an awful lot like "Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho". Yet another data point in the latest round of "Idiocracy or Reality?"

Does no one here read The Athletic? It is essentially the digital-era successor to what SI and the Sporting News used to be in their heyday, and is about as far removed from crowdsourced journalism as you can get, with some pretty well-known, seasoned sports journalists on its masthead. They can hire good writers and provide quality coverage because they are paywalled and subscription-based. I'd been hearing a lot of favorable word-of-mouth about them around a year and a half ago when they ran a promotion offering a healthy discount on one-year subscriptions, so I took the plunge. It didn't take long to convince me that it was a worthy addition to my daily reading regimen, and I didn't think twice about continuing to subscribe at the regular rate when the auto-renew date approached. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Athletic

That's about the best possible scenario, given the family's apparent desire to divest a lot of their holdings after Mari Hulman George's death. "The Captain" runs a tight ship. Anticipating questions regarding conflict of interest as a team owner and a track owner, he's already indicated he will be stepping back from day-to-day operations of the team and his usual position running race-day strategy to focus on running the Speedway.

Now that the Series is over, it must be time to switch gears from "Fuck Joe Buck" to "Fuck Scott Boras".

Hindsight is certainly 20/20, but I also think Greinke should've been given a longer leash. The guy has ice in his veins and had been dominant up until that point. Hinch said afterward that he'd rather pull him one pitch too soon than one pitch too late, but his pitch count was still reasonable and he'd pitched into the 9th inning just a month ago before losing a no-hitter. The timing of going to the bullpen aside, I can't fault Hinch too much for going with Harris before Osuna. Harris had been better than Osuna in the postseason - he hadn't surrendered a run until Game 6. But he had been used a lot, and there's some after-the-fact speculation now that he was simply running on fumes as the Series neared its end. Anyway, congrats to the Nats on a well-deserved championship. A truly memorable season that came down to two teams who both did so many unprecedented things, culminating in a Series with no home wins and the Nats with a ridiculous five successive elimination games in which they were behind and came back to win. I read somewhere that no team had come back from being down so far below .500 at the beginning of the season to win the Series since the 1914 "Miracle" Braves. Looking forward to next season with a likely Astros starting rotation of Verlander, Greinke, a healthy McCullers, and Urquidy. But that's a topic for the hot stove thread.

Hardcopy computer reference books are notorious for becoming outdated quickly, and I say that as someone who's sitting next to a bookcase full of them as I type this. Probably better to find online resources/references for basic stuff - perhaps something even more streamlined like this quick reference card for Windows 10 might be useful: https://www.customguide.com/cheat_sheets/windows-10-quick-reference.pdf For specific questions, I've rarely failed to find the answer to a technical question by simply Googling the question or several targeted keywords. You'd be surprised how often even IT professionals turn to Google to figure something out. You don't need to memorize everything when you've mastered the ability to locate relevant information quickly.

Must be part of Pizza Rat's posse.

I've always considered watches to be jewelry. I've never been big on jewelry, but when I still worked in a formal office environment, I wore a watch, a wedding ring, and a college ring. I haven't worn anything but a wedding ring for the past several years, as I primarily work from home and telecommute now.

A couple of sites that have general guidelines: https://success.highfive.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001923611-Recommended-TV-Picture-Settings-all-brands- https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/how-to-calibrate-your-tv There are other sites out there that have ballpark settings for specific TVs - they can usually be found by Googling the specific manufacturer and model of a TV and "recommended settings". Going a bit further, there are several calibration discs that can be used to fine-tune things with more precision than generic recommended settings. Spears & Munsil has one for UHD/4K displays: https://www.amazon.com/Spears-Munsil-Benchmark-Blu-ray-Disc/dp/B07Q2KBDKV Note the reviews which point out that you have to get the detailed instructions for use from S&M's website as there's no documentation included with the disc. S&M also had an earlier version for 1080p displays (Disney's WOW and Digital Video Essentials were two other 1080p calibration discs that were generally well-regarded). Using one of these discs will get you about as far as you can go short of hiring an ISF-certified professional to calibrate your TV.