Randy Twizzle

A company called Machina Dynamica is offering something called the "Intelligent Chip" which is supposed to permanently improve the sound of any CD by a kind of magical process. From the company website:(http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina27.htm) Instructions: Remove the orange Intelligent Chip from its clear plastic protective case and place it on top of the CD/DVD/SACD player directly above the transport section, silver label facing up. Next, insert the disc to be upgraded in the player, push "Play" and allow the disc to play for 2 seconds. The Chip can also be placed on top of the player while the disc is already playing with similar results. The upgrade takes less than 2 seconds and is permanent. Once the disc is upgraded, either remove the Intelligent Chip from the player and return it to its protective case or leave it on top of the player and insert the next disc to be upgraded into the player. Discs may be upgraded sequentially, leaving the Chip in place on the top of the player. If left on top of the player, the Chip will not function until the next disc to be upgraded is inserted in the player and played. Always store the Chip in its protective case, well away from the player.

As these two 6/25/68 obituaries (which I'm reproducing in their entirety) show, Robison was both a composer and a musician.

The same type of "look what I found" school of spam for this site has appeard in several forums. http://www.google.com/search?q=aeonradio&q...lr=&sa=N&tab=gw

"It's a Blue World" is track 1, you have to scan past that toget to Lover Come Back. On my player its shows as track 1 with an index of 0

I heard a couple of takes of "Lover Come Back to Me" and then strangely enough "Paul is Dead."

One of the first hit comedy records was Joe Hayman's "Cohen on the Telephone" from 1913: "Hello? Hello? Are you dere? Hello? Vat number do I vant? Vell, vot numbers have you got? Oh, excuse me. My mistook. I vant Central 248 please. Yes, dat's right, 248. I say, Miss, am I supposed to keep on saying hello and are you dere until you come back again? Vell don't be long! Hello? Are you dere...I vant to see de manager, please. Vot do you say? This is not a telescope, it is a telephone? Say, you tink you're very clever, ain't it? Vell, do me a favor. Just hang a small piece of crepe on your nose. Your brains are dead! And if I have any more of your impertenence, I'll speak to the manager about you. I said I'll...oh...oh, YOU'RE de manager. Oh, I beg your pardink. Much obliged..." I guess you had to be there... http://www.comedystars.com/Bios/hayman_joe.shtml

One of my favorite Schaap moments took place during a Sidney Bechet festival when he lost his temper on the air and threatened to stop the festival cold because too many listeners were calling the station and bothering him with questions, comments etc. when he needed to be doing other things. It was hilarious to hear him carry on like a stressed out substitute teacher, I wish I had a tape of it.

From 1932

I did the "whack thing" back in the 70s.

Are there any studies of kids who think that their sex life (or lack thereof) is nobody's elses business?

And never play cards with any man named Doc.

Wake me when she apologizes for those exercise videos.

MYSTIC, Conn. (AP) -- After bringing in a parade of males and watching for years as nature never took its course, scientists at Mystic Aquarium have performed what is believed to be the first artificial insemination of a beluga whale. Aquarium scientists, with help from their peers at Sea World, artificially inseminated Kela, a 24-year-old beluga, on Thursday morning. After giving the whale hormones to induce the release of an egg into the reproductive tract, workers used a crane to lift Kela out of the water and place her on a mat. Frozen sperm from a Sea World beluga was then inserted. The process took only a few minutes. Scientists plan to use ultrasound and blood tests over the next few days to monitor the 1,156-pound whale with the hope that the procedure worked. Beluga whales have been born in captivity, but never through artificial insemination. Kela would deliver a calf in about 14 months if the procedure was successful, but scientists believe there is only a slim chance of that happening. That is because little is known about beluga reproduction, said Todd Robeck, a veterinarian and reproductive physiologist from Sea World in San Antonio, Texas. ``We don't know whether it will work or won't work, but things went well,'' he told The Day of New London, moments after placing thawed sperm inside Kela with an endoscope. Tracy Romano, the aquarium's director of research and veterinary services, said the birth of a new beluga may not happen because many things can go wrong. ``It's mostly a learning experience and to get information for the future,'' she said. There are about 30 belugas in captivity. Aquariums and water parks across the country want to increase that number. Because it is difficult to get permits to capture wild belugas, the focus has shifted to trying to breed them in captivity. This has meant moving whales from one location to another, which can be stressful for them. Scientists say it would be better to inseminate whales with sperm that can be shipped around the country. They say the work will help them learn about how wild belugas breed and how to better protect them. Robeck has been successful in attempts to artificially inseminate killer whales and dolphins. He and other scientists spent the past three years doing research in preparation for Thursday's procedure. Kela and Naku, the aquarium's female belugas, were not ideal candidates for the procedure because neither had ever been pregnant and because of their advanced age, Robeck said. However, they are extremely well trained, which made the procedure easier. ``There is just an incredible amount of variables involved in this,'' said Gerard Burrow, president and chief executive officer of the aquarium. ``But it's really important for us to understand the reproduction of these animals.''

It's too late for a death watch but I just read that Frank Perdue has died

If AMG is to believed, Jim Nabors once played Trumpet on a 1961 Lil Hardin Armstrong record produced by Chris Albertson. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&t...9l98b5b4tsqs~T4

One of the few things I remember about the short reign John Paul I is that when news of his death came during a broadcast of a NY Yankee game, announcer Phil Rizzuto said "that's puts a damper even on a Yankee victory."

In 1979 when the Pope visited Washington DC there was a motorcade through the city. There were a lot of souvenir vendors on the streets and money was rapidly changing hands, which is probably why I found a $20 bill in the middle of a busy sidewalk. It was my own papal miracle. I spent some of it on "Someday My Prince Will Come" and since then I've always associated the Pope with that album.

Apparently some of the bixophiles at the bix forum also have some doubts http://www.network54.com/Forum/message?for...geid=1111068455

Perhaps "scam" was a little harsh, but I'm sorry if I find the item description a little suspicious. And how the hell does showing a picture of Bix carrying a instrument case validate the item's authenticity.

Miles traveled to Cedar Rapids for this....? http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...7501306793&rd=1

From the NY Daily News iPod users had better start keeping their eyes - as well as their ears - open on trains and on the streets. Thefts of the music-playing gizmos, game-playing cell phones and other popular electronic devices are the new trend in subway crime - and are partly responsible for an underground crime surge this year, police said yesterday. But it's not just subway riders who are getting hit - iPodders are increasingly being targeted above ground, too, police sources said. "iPods have made bus stops a choice location for purse snatching," one police source said. Subway felonies overall are up 14% through mid March, compared with the same time period last year. Underground robberies are up nearly 20%, according to police statistics. "The robbery increase is linked to a rash of forced taking of cell phones and iPods by juveniles from other juveniles," NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said. Another police source, however, said it's not just teens committing the crimes. "Kids are shaking down other kids for iPods, but adult crooks like them, too," the source said. "Word is out that teachers wear iPods, so snatch-and-grabs are big around schools." Police have been attacking the trend in the subways with "impact teams," each with eight officers and a sergeant, on lines and at stations where robberies are up, Browne said. The iPodders stand out with their telltale white earphones - a dead giveaway they're plugged into a music machine that runs hundreds of dollars. Glen Fox, 26, an advertising agency editor, nearly had his iPod lifted on a Manhattan subway three weeks ago. He felt a series of bumps and spied a young man pulling his iPod out of his jacket pocket. "I yelled and cursed," he said. Eric Diaz, 19, a teacher's assistant in the Bronx, had an unattended iPod stolen from his office at school. He has no fears, however, on the subway. "I'm a black belt [in karate] so I'm not worried," he said. One cop who works the L line in Brooklyn said the thefts often take place at night. The crooks grab an iPod and jump off trains just as the doors are closing - an old-time technique that's proven useful in snatching the high-tech devices. "They time it right and they're home free," the officer said. Browne stressed that although the crime spike has brought the subway system up to about 10 felonies a day, that's well below the 12 to 17 seen daily in 1995-2000.

Rex Reed in the NY Observer has a tribute to Short http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/onthetown.asp Like many of Reed's tributes to the recently deceased it borders on self-parody: "One more anecdote: One cold winter weekend, when we were both house guests at Claudette Colbert’s house in Barbados, Bobby and I were walking on the beach (a sight you don’t want to see) when we passed one of those second-rate surfside motels that cater to the worst kind of British tourists. On the wooden deck, a pudgy woman red as a boiled lobster was waving frantically with one of those floppy straw hats you buy in Caribbean airport lounges. “She knows us,” I said. “Oh, God, ignore her … too tacky for words,” scowled Bobby, whose eyesight was so bad he sometimes mistook C.E.O.’s for head waiters. I moved closer. “My God, Bobby,” I yelped. “It’s Judi Dench!” His mood did an about-face. We took her home for tea."

Straight from the pages of The Onion LAS VEGAS—During a Tuesday press conference at the National Gonzo Press Club, members of the nation's foremost organization of gonzo journalists vowed to carry on the mission of its founder Hunter S. Thompson, who took his life last month. "Now that the whore-beasts and the scum-sucking degenerate rat bastards in Wall Street and the White House are hell-bent on turning us all into pliant, Scripture-mewling puppet-slaveys, we must take up Hunter's fallen colors and charge into the fray," said NGPC president Gene Zolonga, who is the National Affairs and Shark Hunting Editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer. "The next four years will be an unprecedented monument to bestial human ugliness, but I'd sooner let Yakuza thugs strap a rabid wolverine to my groin than shirk my responsibilities as a gonzo journalist." The heavily sweating, speed-frenzied Zolonga then removed a Luger automatic pistol from his coat and shot the microphone with a deafening blast. The NGPC is composed of nearly 3,000 journalists who practice gonzo, a subjective, emotionally charged observational reporting style that is often fueled by recreational drug use. Members of the 34-year-old organization cumulatively hold 14 Pulitzer Prizes, including eight in the Distinguished Weirdness In Feature Writing category. "It's up to us to carry on the mentor's vision and expose all in American life that is strange, terrible, bad, crazy, or bad crazy," Zolonga said. He then climbed onto the podium and emitted a blood-curdling screech. "I am full of love, you motherfucking bastards. Pardon me, I believe my heart just stopped." Gonzo stringer Zach Kiel, who most recently wrote "Fear, Loathing At The Owensboro Parks And Recreation Department" for the Louisville Courier-Journal, said Thompson will go down in the history of American letters as "the greatest gonzo reporter there ever was." "Hunter opposed the editing of half-truths in all of his endeavors," Kiel said. "He had balls like an elephant and a cruelly beautiful prose style to match. He had stiff competition, but I'd say he bested even a hardened pro like Del Armbruster, who once wrote a story about Amazon gold prospectors while engulfed in fire head-to-toe." Even gonzo journalists who have disagreed with Thompson in the past, such as award-winning New York Times columnist Heck Murdo, count him as a freak comrade. "We did have sharp differences in opinion," Murdo said. "He thought Richard Nixon should have had his intestines slowly unwound onto a giant cable spool. I thought he should have been lashed to an oceanside cliff near San Clemente, so that ospreys could feast on his eyes. We feuded for years, at one point conducting a bourbon- and mescaline-fueled motorized-cart demolition derby on a Lake Tahoe golf course. But we patched things up when Dubya was elected, agreeing—to our mutual horror—that Nixon far outclassed that Jesus-loving pinheaded man-child." During the past four decades, gonzo journalists have encountered their share of critical backlash, with college journalism departments around the nation reducing funding for gonzo-journalism programs and local editors questioning the wisdom of covering school-board meetings and slow-pitch softball matches on amyl nitrate. "The gonzo philosophy is not always an effective or practical way to convey fact," Tulsa Daily Courier managing editor Patrick Jacobs said. "Average newspaper readers want to turn to the weather page and see the next day's forecast. They don't really have much use for a map captioned, 'Leeches are sucking my spinal fluid!' And when the sports page contains an unintelligible 3,000-word screed about ballpark hot-dog buns in place of the major-league scores, I get mail." Gonzo entertainment writer Gail Nucci said 14 publications dropped her syndicated gossip column "Vacuous Sluts And Perfidious Dandies" over the course of the past year. "The scores of out-of-work gonzo journalists say it all," said Nucci, an angel-dust abuser who tried to place Hilary Duff under citizen's arrest at the world premiere of Raise Your Voice last October. "Save for a handful of maverick magazine publishers, editors are too busy slobbing the knobs of the men on high to risk publishing an original voice." In spite of these challenges, Zolonga is adamant that gonzo journalism has a place in this century. "The world is growing assuredly weirder," Zolonga said. "Just as history remembers such prominent journalist-commentators as H.L. Mencken and Mike Royko, I have faith that future generations of swine will know the name of Hunter S. Thompson."

Here's a review of a SF concert, that appeared in the July 9, 2001 SF Chronicle. It isn't pretty: Shuggie Otis stumbled going through the door. If the reissue of his 27-year-old lost psychedelic soul masterpiece, "Inspiration Information," on rock star David Byrne's label gave the 47 year- old guitarist a second chance, he didn't help the cause with the debacle of a performance he gave Saturday at the Fillmore Auditorium. Bad enough that a musician missing in action for the better part of a quarter-century should show up for a major headline concert appearance before a near-capacity crowd so obviously unprepared -- he hadn't even bothered to tune his guitar before going onstage and the band clearly didn't know the material -- but by the time he finished his haphazard, inept performance nearly two and a half hours after it started, only a handful of diehards remained in the hall. FLURRIES OF NOTES Even his unquestioned skills on guitar, which earned him an invitation to join the Rolling Stones when he was barely out of his teens, were poorly displayed. His solos were never focused or pointed, just flashy flurries of notes and runs up and down the fretboard that reeked of desperation, a man hopelessly flailing in the water while he drowned. It was a sad, discouraging sight. Otis has lived in near obscurity since the 1974 release of his third solo album, playing as a sideman in bands led by either his father, R&B pioneer Johnny Otis, or his father-in-law, big band jazz arranger Gerald Wilson. He wasn't even working either of those gigs when the CD rerelease hit earlier this year to great critical acclaim and actual sales (the CD has stayed on the best-selling lists, for instance, at the main San Francisco Tower Records store). BAND HADN'T PRACTICED His band, which included his younger brother Nicky on drums, obviously hadn't practiced much (if at all). The three-piece horn section clearly didn't know what was coming next and, while they stayed game throughout the evening, playing riffs from other people's records, they wisely backed away from the microphones early in the proceedings unless they were taking solos, and there were plenty of those. The evening was little more than a pointless blues jam -- something that was made abundantly clear early on, when the trombonist took his second solo by the third song -- and not a very good one at that. Otis switched between guitar and organ, aimlessly, without any strategy. He would just wander over to the organ after laying his guitar down on the stage (since he didn't bring enough stands to hold his three guitars) and noodle to no effect. Sometimes he would change his mind before playing a single note on the keyboard and meander back out front to play guitar. He strapped on an electric bass and, in front of nothing but the other bass and drums, played "lead" bass for about 10 minutes. FORGOT TO PLUG IN He even had trouble simply handling his equipment. He started playing one of his guitars before he remembered to plug it in. He caused feedback when he didn't turn his guitar off and screamed at the sound engineer to stop the feedback (something only Otis could do by turning the guitar down). In fact, he worked over the sound man mercilessly throughout the evening. Usually musicians straighten out these technical problems in advance or pretend they are not happening. To call them out over and over again is an embarrassment to all involved. There wasn't a single moment in the show where Otis seemed on top of his game. Toward the end of the second hour, he suddenly discovered a set list on the back of an amplifier and started consulting it, which may be why he played two songs that he had already performed earlier. If these guys had been auditioning for some low-life dive of a blues bar, they wouldn't have gotten the gig.

I've actually begun to enjoy those rare occasions when I get an unsolicited phone call. It's allows me to display a snarling, anti-social, tough guy persona which I'm not able to do during the rest of my waking hours. I can be as nasty as I want to be to the poor bastard on the other end, without suffering any consequences.