Big Wheel

fixed, I think.

About two years ago I was walking in SF when a man with a mid-sized dog asked me to sign his petition (the petition was for a proposal to save the city money by opening up the garbage collection contracting process to more competition or something). I reached down to pet his "dog" before I realized he was not, in fact, walking a dog.

The sale is obviously over, but bumping this topic....just because. Been digging this label lately. That Treme Brass Band record is indeed very good - I'm a sucker for the Atlantic New Orleans Mosaic and this has the same energy of some of those bands. Other great Arhoolie sessions: Much of the sacred steel guitar stuff Clifton Chenier - Bogalusa Boogie Big Mama Thornton With Muddy Waters There's also a ton of unusual world music (early Hawaiian, Tonga, Samoa, Sarawak, Colombia, Peru)

That's when the fun begins. And by "fun", I mean "probably an unfathomably cold and and large and empty universe where nothing much happens for pretty much forever."

This one, although probably less so in parts of continental Europe, especially when compared to the US. I imagine that once you've ridden a horse, you have a much harder time munching on one...

Also in the Dr. Phil interview Tuiasosopo more-or-less admitted he was gay before retreating to "I'm confused". I still think the most likely scenario goes something like this: Tuiasosopo and Te'o are (or were) indeed lovers and one of them - I can't decide who - is the brains behind the coverup. Everything up to this point has been relatively successful at keeping the damage limited. Although Tuiasosopo has had to bear the brunt of the blame, as well as come out and risk hell with his minister father, Te'o has been successfully shielded from having to deal with the worst of the fallout. The phone records and voicemails were selectively released, and nobody asked too many questions why. The former didn't list any dates after the supposed death of Lennay Kekua, which means we don't know whether or not contact with "Kekua" really ceased when Te'o says it did. And obviously the "voicemails" could have been fabricated by Tuiasosopo and his cousin well after shit started to hit the fan. Last thought - is Ronaiah Tuiasosopo really so secretive that he could become obsessed with Manti Te'o, carry on a fake romance with him for a year, and yet never say to any close confidant "I'm in love with Manti Te'o but it's really f'ed up and he thinks I'm a girl"? Maybe, but my money's against it.

Are they out of copyright? They will be very soon, according to the date on the cans.

No music at all in the SF Big Lots. I did pick up some canned tomatoes, though ($1.70 for 56oz).

The first thing that popped into my noggin was "beard"...Surprised that angle isn't getting more play, but frankly, I've been avoiding coverage of this bizarre story. Actually his being Gay is what many if not of most of those who think he was in on it was the reason behind it. The problem I have with that is he has had girlfriends before this @ ND and had one soon after the death of the love of his life. He had real life girls @ ND he could have used as a beard and it would have a lot easier; especially with him being a Mormon which easily covers there being premarital sex in the relationship. Unfortunately, the pathological liar (see my long story above) does not always care about having an ironclad cover story. My roommate had numerous opportunities for female beards if having a beard was his primary concern. But it wasn't - his primary concern was, or eventually became, just lying for lying's sake. I think there are reasons to question whether Te'o fits the profile of pathological liar+closeted, but "he hooked up with girls at ND" is not one of them. I did read your post. Your friend talked about girls that no one saw and had opportunities for a female beard. Te'o actually went out with real life girls before, during (before they supposedly became serious.), and after, which other people saw him with. There are even pictures of him with his most recent one. Why go through such a convoluted plan was my point? He really had the perfect excuse for the lack of sex in any relationship with a woman. I didn't include it because it would have made an already long story even longer, but a small percentage of the girls my roommate bragged about his encounters with were real. He had apparently hooked up with one of the girls in our dorm. He also had a girlfriend (or someone he claimed was his girlfriend) from high school who visited our dorm early in the school year. Funnily enough, when she came to visit it turned out I knew her - I had gone to summer camp with her a few years before. Asshole roommate got very irritated/jealous of our chatting and we never saw her again after that. It's true that closeted gay men who are simply looking for a beard can find female beards if that's all they want. They don't have to make up stories out of whole cloth - but if they're also addicted to telling lies, that's another story. You really have to have spent time with a serious liar to understand where I'm coming from here and why I think it's entirely possible that Te'o "dated" real girls while ALSO faking a committed heterosexual relationship AND hiding a same-sex relationship. Pathological liars do not operate on the same plane of behavioral logic as you or me. Their schemes don't "make sense" until you realize that the main point is just to con others to the max.

The first thing that popped into my noggin was "beard"...Surprised that angle isn't getting more play, but frankly, I've been avoiding coverage of this bizarre story. Actually his being Gay is what many if not of most of those who think he was in on it was the reason behind it. The problem I have with that is he has had girlfriends before this @ ND and had one soon after the death of the love of his life. He had real life girls @ ND he could have used as a beard and it would have a lot easier; especially with him being a Mormon which easily covers there being premarital sex in the relationship. Unfortunately, the pathological liar (see my long story above) does not always care about having an easy, ironclad cover story. My roommate had numerous opportunities for female beards if having a beard was his primary concern. But it wasn't - his primary concern was, or eventually became, just lying for lying's sake. I think there are reasons to question whether Te'o fits the profile of pathological liar+closeted, but "he hooked up with girls at ND" is not one of them.

Has anyone here had experience with the beard + pathological liar combination? Because I have. One of my roommates freshman year of college was...well, at first he just seemed like a backbiting asshole. One of those people you think is really friendly until you have 3 or 4 weird passive-aggressive encounters. First semester he shared a bedroom with one of our other roommates. Not too much weird stuff happened (except the assholery), though he'd occasionally disappear some nights and not show up again till the next day, claiming that he'd passed out drunk at someone's random house party. Second semester was different. We switched rooms around and now the guy had a room to himself. Around February we'd be sitting around and he'd start throwing out the "hey, what do you guys think it'd be like to have a gay roommate? Can you even imagine?" As my familiarity with gay men had up to that point been almost entirely with the flaming musical theater types (3 years of performing arts high school), I stupidly assumed this was a hypothetical question. "Uh...I dunno, why don't you ask the guys down the hall" (there were 6 of them, one of whom was out and moderately flamboyant, and they seemed to coexist OK). I'm still kicking myself for not being the first to figure it out. One day, my other roommate (let's call him "Ed") pulled the other two of us aside and said "Don't you think it's weird that he brags constantly about all the girls he's hooked up with but we never see any of them here? And the gay roommate question; that's not a hypothetical, it's like he's sounding us out, trying to get a feel for how we'd react." But all the evidence was still circumstantial at that point. Around late March he started going on and on about this hot prep school girl he had met (online?) and was going to nail. Ed was from a town about 45 minutes away from the prep school and they ended up working out an arrangement over spring break: asshole roommate would drive them both over in his car and in exchange he could stay at Ed's parents' place for the week with Ed. Long story short, he ends up disappearing much of the time in the car after he gets to Ed's. This is where things start getting really bizarre. I was the only one in the room who'd brought a scanner to college. So when he and Ed get back from spring break, he asks me if I can scan some stuff for him and email them to him. He leaves me 4 photos to scan: two of him, and two of some random guy we've never seen before, posing next to his car at some rest stop off the highway. Evidently they had no timer or anything on the camera so they simply shot pictures of each other rather than ask someone else to shoot the both of them together. I flip the photos upside down to scan them and there's a note on one of the ones of him: "To One Hot Boy I Love Who has Changed My Life." So on the one hand, the guy seemed like he was trying the weirdest, most passive and halting way ever to come out. He couldn't have possibly been so stupid as to think I wouldn't see that. On the other hand...he seemed to never acknowledge or care about the tower of lies he'd been building; in fact, they would only get bigger after that point. A couple of weeks later he starts bitching about how his parents had burdened him with his high school senior "cousin" for an upcoming weekend, and would it be a big deal if the cousin crashed in the room over the weekend? Cousin ends up staying in his room for two whole weeks. Oh, forgot to mention the obvious: cousin is the same dude as is in the pictures. Also forgot to mention another hilarious lie: the hot prep school girl's name is apparently "Jessica", while "cousin's" name just happens to be "Jesse." I could fill in more details of all the lies, big and small, that we eventually figured out, many of them having nothing to do with being gay, but I'll wrap up the story with the $100 or so that gradually disappeared from my wallet right around the time he was wining and dining his "cousin" at some of the city's more expensive restaurants. As a result asshole roommate is one of 4 or 5 people on my list of those I will immediately cross the street to avoid. The lesson of the whole saga though was that this wasn't really a case of an elaborate edifice of lies built simply to maintain the ability to stay in the closet. Rather, the guy was a sociopath: the most charitable interpretation I have is that he might have started lying to keep the closet an option, but continued because he enjoyed manipulating others, and if anything got more enjoyment out of the really outrageous and dumb lies because he interpreted others' failure to confront him as a sign that he could say anything and people would believe him.

I mentioned Deschutes earlier. Just wanted to add that it's tricky to generalize about "distribution". My brother in Oregon has been recommending various Deschutes brews to me for years, but I've come across them pretty rarely in terms of casual observation (checking restaurant menus, shopping at big retailers like BevMo, etc). When I do turn up out-of-state products, they tend to be just the most popular beers from a given brewery (Widmer hef always being available at Safeway being the obvious example). Finding specific products- particularly seasonal offerings- is another matter. I did find a couple of Deshutes brews (Inversion IPA, Twilight Summer Ale) in a supermarket in Kailua-Kona last Summer, which was a bit of a surprise. Inversion and Twilight are not too hard to find in SF (I don't care for Twilight at all though - the only Deschutes brew I don't like). It helps to shop at small retailers for craft beer. While the likes of Total Wine and Bevmo cover a lot of ground, you'll do best filling in the gaps with stores that are specifically devoting themselves to beer. In SF the main ones are probably Healthy Spirits on Castro, City Beer Store on Folsom, and maybe New Star-Ell on Divisadero for some of the Belgians. I admit I have more patience than most though when it comes to poking around and rarely go in seeking a specific brew. You're on the Peninsula, right? I know the south bay/Peninsula a lot less well but here might be some threads to get started: http://beeradvocate.com/community/threads/san-jose-beer-stores.50894/ http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/763431

Definitely not purely local. Both Rogue and Deschutes have wide regional distribution (and I spotted Rogue beers in Florida today). I don't know what the liquor store situation is like in Peoria though...

Sam Adams I'm conflicted about - the tie to Boston at this point is BS marketing as most of the beer is made in Ohio these days, and I've never really been impressed by most of the beers, though every year I look for the Summer Ale with grains of paradise out of nostalgia for east coast summer BBQs. I do think they are at least interesting with trying to do new flavors/styles quite frequently, even though the product is usually not up to par. But Sierra Nevada is the real deal despite its size and success. Though they're clearly well-made beers, I've never really preferred their flagship pale ale or the IPAs...but the pint of their Kellerweis that I had on draft a few months back absolutely ROCKED.

1) After Prohibition, the beer industry was not deregulated until the Carter administration. During this ~50 year period, the industry underwent ever-increasing rounds of consolidation until most of the local breweries that hadn't been put out of business by Prohibition itself were gobbled up anyway by larger companies. This had the general trend of making US beers worse until deregulation allowed smaller craft breweries to thrive (imagine if the only furniture you could buy was made by IKEA). 2) The US's beer heritage was largely German with a little Czech thrown in there in a few places. Thus very few beer styles besides typical lagers (pilsners, Dortmunders, etc.) were produced. 3) Probably both effect and cause, the industry has long marketed beer to the masses as a slightly alcoholic, cheap thirst quencher rather than a good tasting beverage like wine. Thus even today many American beer consumers (especially those over the age of about 45-50) won't ever warm to styles like porters, bitters, etc. (to say nothing of the Belgian styles). They see beer as something you want to drink to cool off and get a little buzz on after a hard day at work or after mowing the lawn in 90 degree heat, not something that will be savored for tasting good. 4) I suspect that transport and and storage negatively affect all export lagers no matter where they're from. I personally think Heineken as served in the US tastes like stale piss and would rather drink a number of cheap domestic lagers if forced to choose only between those two. It also may be more prone to skunking in those green bottles...haven't ever ordered Heineken on draft to compare.

The part that never really made sense to me was why they couldn't/didn't work out a deal to buy the stuff for less from EMI. I'm willing to pay Mosaic premium price for a premium product, but this isn't that (especially the shipping costs, yeesh). I sent them an email around 2002 about why the discs were expensive relative to other stores and got a response, maybe from Cuscuna himself, that they couldn't sell the stuff for any less because of their costs. You may not own the material, but you're a bigshot producer, you have extensive ties to EMI, AND you have a much more fanatical customer base than the average store. That doesn't give you any pull with EMI at least in working out a better wholesale deal? If the whole idea was to simply make a few more bucks off of non-price-conscious buyers on impulse buys to go with their Mosaic boxes, then the strategy makes sense I guess. But still...I would have sold the things as loss leaders if it got people to buy more Mosaic boxes...

This doesn't seem to be how things really went down. http://www.tomajazz....s_peter_eng.htm So even by Sims's own admission his difficulties getting work weren't an ideological thing, related to his "ranting" - they were the direct result of him refusing to do stuff in the studio. That might not be nice, asking a guy to whore himself out and play music he doesn't want to play (and possibly ignoring him as a "difficult" character for sessions that he might want to play), but it's not appropriate to claim that he was blacklisted for a heterodox viewpoint. They were going to play fusion, with or without him. He had made abundantly clear that he wouldn't play rock. Why would they want to keep hiring a guy who refuses to play the music you want to make?

Certainly one of the more human and complex of Dahl's works, going beyond his typical random lonely orphan protagonist and bringing social class into the mix. Ironic, isn't it - Dahl's best stuff is often when he ditches the talking grasshoppers and Vermicious Knids and just tells a good story about sticking it to the rich.

Interesting point, and one that kind of raises some provocative questions about children's literature. As you said, kids certainly have an id - I'm sure I engaged in this kind of silly demonization of random adults as a little kid out of some trivial slight on their part. Is children's literature supposed to foster growth and not just hold a maybe-approving mirror up to a kid's darker side? And is the fact that Dahl usually doesn't do this one of the reasons his stories are so beloved by many kids?

Since this thread is now all about nitpicking, I'll add some: Mario Bauza was not "Machito's trumpet player." He was the musical brains behind the whole operation of that band and pretty much created Afro-Cuban jazz by himself. If anything it would be fairer to call Machito "Mario Bauza's frontman", but they started the band together so let's just let each share the credit. Much more oral history at this great Bobby Sanabria interview: http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/03/kenya-in-concer.html

One more bump for this one...I'm down to my last pair of MX-400s, and those are on their last legs after a trip to the beach. Some tiny grains of sand got into them I think and now the sound's all wonky. Anyone got any recommendations? Some people claim the Monoprice 8320s offer good audio quality for the price but I am wary that they'll be uncomfortable. Also it sounds like they are designed with very heavy bass boost for hip-hop listening and I'm concerned that other genres will sound bad.

Yes, there is in fact a 99% chance. The name of the team is the Warriors.

In other news in The Conference That Doesn't Matter Anyway Because We All Know What LeBron's Going To Do In May™, I hear the second-best team in Los Angeles has hired Mike D'Antoni for his next job getting mercilessly abused by superstar players coaching.

Heat over Nuggets on last-minute Ray Allen heroics. Parenthetical: maybe I'm reading too much into things here, but my sense is that LeBron is going out of his way in the early going to be a distributor, a Spoelstra-endorsed strategy. You only need one point to tie but you draw up a play whose second option is the kick-out 3? Why? Only reason I can think of is that they really want to make Allen feel valued and don't care if that causes them to drop a game here and there in the regular season. Who's the better 0-3 team, Nuggets or Lakers?

I think the NW division doesn't have a totally sucky amongst the bunch, unlike other divisions. The Southwest could be a sleeper, with the Mavs looking stronger-than-expected and the Rockets in a much better position after the Harden trade. The question mark is New Orleans and how much Anthony Davis improves them. Probably enough for mediocrity, but not better. I think the Rockets gave up a lot for Harden. Kevin Martin is a 20ppg scorer and Jeremy Lamb could develop into a stud. + two 1st round picks. Was it too much?? Time will tell. Regardless I don't see the Rockets making the playoffs this season unless there are an astonishing amount of injuries in the West. Maybe not, but I think an at-worst 9th or 10th place finish is likely. That certainly doesn't qualify as "totally sucky."