Dave Garrett

It appears to be back online now. Must've just been a temporary glitch.

Spiders would have been cool. Or Naps. Someone on Reddit said they'd been hoping for "Cleveland Washington Football Team".

More than the weekend, IIRC it's until the end of this month/beginning of August. They usually run these semiannual Criterion sales for almost a month.

I've always been partial to Moving On and All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, but how much those "grab" you may be at least in part a function of how familiar you are with Houston. Some years before he established his much larger, multi-building bookstore complex in Archer City, he owned a used and rare bookshop that used the same name (Booked Up) in Houston, and could frequently be seen working the counter there when he was in town. I just saw that longtime newspaperman/author Leon Hale has died at the age of 99. It's been a bad couple of days for venerable Texas writers.

I'm surprised that's been up for as long as it has. Milestone Films has the rights to many of Shirley Clarke's films, and they will not hesitate to have YouTube issue a DMCA takedown notice if someone uploads one. In addition to THE CONNECTION, they've also released ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA on DVD: https://milestonefilms.com/collections/shirley-clarke

It can take several days to a week after exposure for the virus to incubate sufficiently to register a positive test result: Evidence suggests that testing tends to be less accurate within three days of exposure, and the best time to get tested is five to seven days after you were exposed. Here's hoping your wife recovers quickly and uneventfully, and that you only wind up with a mild case (assuming you haven't already had it).

I got my 89-year-old father and 88-year-old mother vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine a week ago. Saw an alert on my phone around 10pm one night that slots were opening up in the next county over (about a 40 minute drive from their house), and immediately got on my computer and was able to schedule them both right away. Showed up at the designated date and time, and it could not have gone smoother. It was a drive-through operation being run by one of the local major hospital chains, set up in tents in a parking lot at a performing arts center, and despite the large number of cars converging on the location, the logistics were well-thought-out and we were in and out of there in a little more than a half-hour, including the mandatory 15-minute post-injection wait to make sure there were no adverse reactions. Several hours later, my mom had some of the common side effects that lasted for the next few days in varying degrees (headache, dizziness, nausea, and fatigue), which is a bit worrisome as most people are reporting side effects after the second dose, not the first. Given that she isn't in great health to begin with, I'm hoping she doesn't wind up really knocked for a loop after dose #2, which is already scheduled at the same location in two weeks. My wife had her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine this week (she works in a retirement/assisted living community), and felt really fatigued the day after and thought she was going to have to lie down at work. She came home that day and pretty much went straight to bed, but was back to normal the following day. For myself, I've signed up on every waitlist that is available and hoping I'll be contacted by one of them sooner rather than later.

Good to know. There are a few BFI blu-rays I've been meaning to get, and as I've never ordered directly from them before, I was wondering about their international shipping rates.

I've heard the results of a similar effort at re-eq'ing the Victor and Victor/Bluebird singles from the big Ellington Centennial box. The "fixed" versions were better by leaps and bounds - not a subtle difference at all.

My friend did not make it. The damage to his lungs was too great, and his heart ultimately gave out. His memorial service was yesterday (it was limited to family but was livestreamed so I was able to watch it). He probably had the broadest musical taste of anyone I've ever known - he had been music and choral director at a local church for most of the past two decades, and was equally at home conversing about sixteenth-century liturgical music, Art Tatum, or Frank Zappa. He was one of a kind, and his loss is keenly felt by all who knew him. Two weeks ago, my wife's mother passed. She was 92 and had been in a long-term care facility for the past four years, so her passing was not a complete surprise but was also not really expected right now. She had tested positive for COVID a couple of months ago but remained asymptomatic. She had some underlying health issues, but one still wonders about the lingering effects of COVID even among those who are asymptomatic. Yesterday, my oldest friend's mother-in-law passed. She was 89 and had been in poor health for quite some time (cardiac issues, and had previously had at least one full-blown heart attack). She had recently tested positive for COVID and did display symptoms. I expect that, at a minimum, complications from COVID will be listed as a contributory factor in her death. The point at which we are able to dispense vaccines immediately and on-demand to all who require them cannot get here quickly enough.

A friend of over 35 years has been in the hospital for close to six weeks after testing positive. It looked like he was improving to the point where discharge to a rehab facility was being discussed, then he took a sudden turn for the worse right before Christmas. He was moved to ICU and placed on a ventilator, and came very close to death on Christmas day. The last update I had was that his oxygen levels had significantly improved since then, but he appears to have suffered damage to his lungs and possibly other vital organs. It seems likely that if he is able to survive (and that is still a big if), his life will be far different from what it was previously.

I used to work with a guy who, whenever he heard anyone say "it can't get any worse", would get an extremely serious expression on his face and explain that he never uttered that particular sentiment anymore because the last two times he had done so, things promptly got MUCH worse. He passed away several years ago from Parkinson's. I hadn't been in contact with him for a number of years, but as he was someone who was very firm in his convictions, I'm confident that he stuck to his banishment of that phrase from his vocabulary even as he was staring down death.

FWIW, Shipley's is not at all a purveyor of artisan/hipster donuts. It's just a local/regional chain, as opposed to a national one like Dunkin. I rarely set foot inside a donut shop these days, but when I was in college I used to hit up a local Dunkin almost every morning. Their coffee was a remarkably effective hangover cure. Point and counterpoint: The secret world of the Dunkin’ Donuts franchise kings Hot, Sticky & Sweet

As it so happens, I just ran across an article about that very subject earlier this week. The Payment Comes After

Apologies for the delayed reply. The server refers to the machine on which you have installed the Plex Media Server software. This could be a separate, dedicated machine, depending on what your intended use case is, but I have it installed on my regular Windows desktop machine, which is fairly old and far removed from current performance standards. Plex transcodes media files on the fly depending on available bandwidth and the device you're accessing the files on (another computer, a TV connected to a streaming device such as a Roku with the Plex channel installed, a phone with the Plex app, etc.). This can be CPU-intensive, so folks that are running a Plex server with multiple users accessing it to view high-resolution video files are probably not going to want the server running on the same machine they're using all day. In my case, I use Plex infrequently and I'm never using my desktop for other things at the same time I'm streaming video to my Roku, so I can run the server on my desktop with no problems. It's quite common to store a Plex media library on an EHD or a NAS, but my understanding is that while it's technically possible to install and run the Plex Media Server software on an external drive as well, it's not really recommended due to performance issues. All of my (admittedly limited) experience with Plex has been with using it to stream video, but I'd imagine that using it to stream music files probably doesn't require nearly the horsepower that using it to stream video does.

Plex offers this functionality. Here's a piece from last year comparing Google Play Music and Plex: I ditched Google Play Music for my own Plex server: The good and the bad

Not going to say that kind of functionality doesn't exist somewhere in BoldGrid, but in my (admittedly limited) experience I've never run across it. The Esquire Covers site appears to have been built by a professional web developer, judging from the credit at the bottom of the main page, so there may well be some custom code involved. Sites built with plug-and-play tools like BoldGrid tend to have a more basic look and feel and a few canned bells and whistles. BoldGrid's main selling point is pre-built modules/templates that require no HTML coding, although for those who are comfortable with coding, it's very easy to toggle between BoldGrid's drag-and-drop Visual Editor and the raw code editor.

I've envisioned Mankiewicz eventually growing into the "elder statesman" role on TCM that Robert Osborne held (although, really, no one could ever completely fill Osborne's shoes). I'd likewise hate to see him leave TCM, but I bet he'd get paid more as host of Jeopardy, and given the slash-and-burn approach AT&T has taken since acquiring Warner, it's anyone's guess how long TCM will continue to be around in its current form.

My company uses WordPress, but with BoldGrid, one of the plugins that sits on top of WordPress and allows you to build/maintain sites via a drag-and-drop visual editor: BoldGrid You can test out building a site on BoldGrid's site to see if you like it, then transfer it to a hosting provider when you're ready to do that. We went directly to one of the hosting providers linked on BoldGrid's site, InMotion, and built the site there after setting up an account, so we skipped the transfer step and just published the site when it was ready. My perspective is probably a bit skewed - I have a tech background, but almost none of my past experience is related to website design/building. Still, BoldGrid (and similar plugins) seems to make it relatively painless for novices to get a basic site up and running without a steep learning curve.

I didn't know that Art Fleming had also died as a result of pancreatic cancer. Coincidence, or little-known occupational hazard of hosting Jeopardy?

"This product is no longer available". Apparently it didn't take long for someone to open up their checkbook.

I had a Vespa 125 in college for a while that served me well as a low-cost, two-wheeled commuter before I jumped fully into motorcycling with a 400cc Suzuki. I spent years with a bike as my only transportation, and my last one was a modified '81 Honda CB750F (last of the great air-cooled Honda fours). I still have that bike but it hasn't run in well over ten years after I had to put it into storage due to my living arrangements at the time. At minimum, it will need to have the carbs and brakes rebuilt before it's roadworthy again, a project that I keep intending to tackle before I get too old and infirm to ride safely (although I was suitably impressed a while back when I saw an article in a bike mag about an 80+ year old British guy who was still riding his Vincent Rapide on a regular basis).