DTMX

Speaking of appearing in Ann Arbor at the Kerrytown Concert House, the 2008 EdgeFest line-up has been posted. Lots of strings and reeds this time out. No Andrew Bishop this year, but Gerald Cleaver sits in twice.

Bassist Chris Lightcap has two great quartet recordings - Bigmouth and Lay-Up - with McHenry and Tony Malaby on tenors (Gerald Cleaver on drums). Lots of good tenor interplay all 'round.

NPR has an hour's worth of music from the Village Vanguard perfomance here. Haven't listened to it and am not sure if it is Lovano or McHenry sitting in.

Well, if you thought that Jerry Reed was still alive you'd be right. Until a couple of days ago.

Oh yeah, I've been there. I used to hate asking questions because I didn't know how much work was going to have to be put into giving me an answer. Once (at the office), I asked a guy if he had a stapler I could use. He told me to wait while he asked everyone else around the office, then left. Unknown to me, he went to his boss, who went to his boss who authorized the purchase of said stapler, which my co-worker had to walk a mile down the street to purchase at the Apita department store. About an hour later or so, I had my answer. And it was a pretty crappy stapler.

I used the Yamanote train line (runs a ring around Tokyo) to get just about anywhere in town. Any other place I needed get to, I'd just hop on the subway (Hibiya line runs through Roppongi and will intersect with the Yamanote line at the Ebisu station). Shinjuku is a great part of town; I bought a Derek Bailey CD at the Virgin Megastore there and spent an hour lost inside the Shinjuku station trying to find the Yamanote line to get back home. I miss Japan. Good times...

Seconds (1966), directed by John Frankenheimer, music by Jerry Goldsmith, and totally awesome! If you like Twilight Zone-type stories this is the one you've been waiting for. See it before Hollywood remakes it with Adam Sandler - or Rob Schneider.

I finally got to use this line a week ago when a Vietnamese girl asked me what my name meant. Just rolled off the tongue before I even had a chance to think about it.

I remember one television broadcast when Pete Van Wieren was waxing poetically and said something like "the bat swings, but fails to intercept the little white spear-oid". There's about 30 seconds of silence and then Skip Carey says "Spear-oid?".

That was a big surprise to me. I figured the next Atlanta/Georgia sportscaster to go would be Larry Munson. Skip and Pete were the only reasons I watched the games most of the time; if they weren't announcing, I'd find something else to do.

I thought you were talking about the one in Atlanta: 'Extreme Makeover' Home on Auction Block They were given a $450k house, which they used as collateral for a $450k loan to start a business that failed. They were also given donations of $250k to cover the taxes for the house (and to pay some college tutions for the kids). Apparently they don't have the donations anymore, either. Some people are not good at managing money and giving them money is not going to help them. If the producers & builders had really wanted to help this family they should have built them a nice middle-class home and put all of the donation money in a protected fund to be doled out by a hired manager to pay for taxes and other house-related expenses. But none of that makes for good Cinderella-story television. And unless I'm missing something, the reason that they were chosen to get a new house was because sewage was backing up into the house when it rained. We had the same problem at my parents house and I don't remember any television cameras around when my step-father and I dug up the septic tank in the rain on a Wednesday night. I do remember my mother holding a flashlight for us until she said, "this is stupid, I'm going back inside." Meanwhile, 50 miles north of the foreclosed property, DTMX installed an attic fan into his 28-year-old shithole of a house sans television cameras. Maybe they'll be here next week when the toilets are scheduled to be repaired (my bear-in-the-woods solution has not found favor with the neighbors).

I saw it this morning at 9AM. Was well worth putting off the attic fan installation until the hotter part of the day. I kept away from most of the spoilers so there were a few times during the movie that I was pretty surprised. It reminded me of what I felt when watching Silence of the Lambs: when Lector's onscreen it's the greatest movie ever made in the history of the world; and when he's not, it's just another movie. The Joker was the same way - anytime his character was onscreen it amped up the energy in the scene. Probably because when a character is completely unpredictable it just brings a sense of potential chaos to whatever scene they are in. Every one of my favorite scenes in The Dark Knight was a Joker scene: the disappearing pen/pencil trick, exiting the hospital and hopping on the bus and the interrogation room moment where the Joker was correcting the detective about the number of policemen he (the Joker) had killed. It was only one word, and not even spoken aloud, but it was a great delivery. Oh, and the bank heist. Being a big fan of heists, capers and double-crosses, I was flat-out impressed. Does Heath Ledger deserve a posthumous Oscar for this role? Probably not. I haven't seen a lot of movies this year but I'm sure that someone somewhere has done a better job in some other movie. But he really nailed this part and played the hell out of it. So at least he ended his career with something worth being remembered for (Raul Julia in Street Fighter, I'm looking in your general direction). I wanted to see it in IMAX but all ATL showing are sold out until Monday. With all of the swooping over the skyscrapers, I'd probably barf. Doesn't mean I won't see it; I'll just save dinner for after the movie.

Man, this is awesome. My father's birthday: String of Pearls, Glenn Miller My grandmother's birthday: I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles, Ben Selvin's Novelty Orchestra My great-grandmother's birthday: Mary Had A Little Lamb, Thomas Edison

The Supremes: Baby Love (USA and UK) The Beatles: I Feel Fine (AUS) It's no 16 Tons, but I'm cool with all of them. /Tears of a Clown would have been even more cooler.

Happy birthday, dude.

D'oh! Happy belated...

My right parahippocampal gyrus hangs a little lower than my left parahippocampal gyrus. The doctor said, "Oh, that's normal".

Oh yeah....that or staged car wrecks with lighter fluid... My best friend used to do that. He would take a sheet of plywood and paint it to look like a street and then put two (or more models) on it in various stages of destruction, topped off with a little lighter fluid. He brought one of them to school for show-and-tell and the principal called his mother to come pick him up. He was gone for a few days. It could have been worse though - he might have brought a sample from his Landmine GI Joe collection.

I bought the Godzilla model. It was my first model that used glue - and one of the last (I'm not good with adhesives, especially when I was 6). I had never actually seen what Godzilla looked like so I glued the glow-in-the-dark parts to him. If I had it to do over again (and this topic came up just the other day), I'd have only used the luminescent dorsal fin which did glow in the movies. The whole Aurora catalog freaked me out. For some reason, this picture of King Kong gave me nightmares.

When I heard Steve Miller rhyme "abracadabra" with "reach out and grab ya" I felt like I'd been slapped in the face. Surprisingly enough, this was not the first time Mr. Miller's lyrics had had this effect on me. Radio Birdman (Aussie punk band) have a lyric: Hey girl I watched you dancing To the rocking bands where each syllable of the last line has a chord change on the beat so that it comes out like: Hey girl I watched you dancing To The Rock In Bands I swear that every time I hear it in the car or on the iPod I let out an audible "ugh".

Maybe they were looking through the Yellow Pages for a "serious composer" and they found Wuorinen under "serialist composer". I've always wondered what a twelve-tone Oklahoma! would sound like.

One of my favorite entertainers of all time. He always delivered the laughs.

Love the part of the show where Nigel plays the guitar with a violin.

Al Jolson?

What a coincidence - I had rented Michael Clayton a few days ago and never got around to watching it until last night. Always enjoyed Pollack as an actor.