rostasi

Had a fun, exciting weekend and I return here to see wonderful congrats from fellow board members! Thanks guys! Two Indian concerts (vocalists on the first evening and sarod the next). Also, a movie (first in nearly a year) and, later, a favorite Thai restaurant. Best thing, I think, was the letter with positive review that I received from the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen about a recent work of mine. Nice to receive something uplifting like that. Thanks again everyone for the nice words. best to all! Rod

There was a time when they were considered part of the rodent family just because of their close resemblance, but I think it's changed now. Rabbits are lagomorphs and - this may be too much info - but they have "defining" characteristics:

Also, Sunbeam makes an ultrasonic/electromagnetic pest repeller that's suppose to work on mice, roaches, etc that you just plug in. I didn't notice that it did very much. (but I have used it for creating pieces of music!)

Well, our rats are not those big Willard size things, but just a little bigger than a mouse. This box could be their little mouse house too. (now, where's that peanut butter...)

Right now I'm looking at the tail end of a rat that's sticking out of my trusty "Victor Electronic Rat Trap - Model M240". The night before, it had chewed thru two brand new window screens and left its little darling droppings between the screen and the slinding window. If we had that window open - even slightly, (like we did some others - with little locking mechs on them) - he would've been in the house. Since we live right off of a creek, there's a problem every 18 months or so. Mama was tending to 2 babies in a flower box (much to our surprise and disgust). The babies have grown and all three have been electrocuted. Yes, you have to dump the contents of the box, but when I use to try traps, they'd just all be snapped with nothing to show. Bait under a deck where no other creatures can get to it may have worked some - don't know really...the pellets were gone and I understand that it induces major thirst that never can be satisfied, so maybe... Like most everyone has said - cats are the best for this (and sweet companionship). Our sweetheart was around for nearly 25 years and we haven't had the heart yet to get another...

Hitman!

Thanks Jim and Greg! It's a nice effect! I should've known this. As a youngster, I would use the same idea for recording certain piano sounds. I was trying to get those piano cloud sounds that you can hear on Weather Report's Milky Way from the first album. He must've been using a pedal? It would seem too difficult to do it any other way! Thanks again, Rod

O'Kay! Mosaic sent the O'Day Disc "VIII" Great service.

The Metheny comments on Kenny G are interesting Wonder if Jello has heard of them?

Yeah, tho in Corea's case it was probably Ringo.

JK: That Alive album from Mangione and, especially, Together were two albums that I really liked growing up (tho he took some strange detours on Together). Both have great versions of Sixty Miles Young. I think that for the mid-70's A&M stuff, he, for whatever reason, became more sugar-coated. I've wondered about this general 70's transition into sentimentalism... I guess the money was coming in for some of these guys and you had Klemmer making "sexy" songs and Mangione making mushy sap and James making fop-funk and Corea wanting to "communicate" with his pixie crap and so on... Guys that really could of continued building on their inventiveness just seemed to drop the ball or maybe they just began putting little acorns and spray-paint on them a la Martha Stewart.

Exactly! I don't know if anybody is saying that being open is the same as liking more stuff - at least that's not what I was saying or insinuating. They are two different concepts. One can (and should, I believe) be open to ideas, concepts and eventualities and I hope that we don't all bow down to some "standard of evaluation." Judgements are made using a complicated web of personal experience. Being aware of that when presented with conflicting ideas is the springboard to expanding knowledge.

my can of beer is three quarters empty again, already... Dontcha mean one quarter full? When you're young, you should be open. When you start discriminating, you'll realize that you're no longer young.

half-full, half-empty really.

I don't play guitar, so this is a very elementary question, I'm sure, but what is Billy Butler doing to get this sound during this beautiful solo from a "Groove" Holmes disc. Is this just a slide? title: Laura leader: Richard "Groove" Holmes guitar: Billy Butler album: That Healin' Feelin' The Butler did it!

I think so too, but I also think that we're dutified to tell him a bit of the history of these things. Also, I think something like Sookie Sookie from Grant Green's Alive! has a much heavier staying power when it comes to jazz-funk than something from BJ.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side' By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems. The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society. It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality. Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills. The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world. “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. “The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.” Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions. He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy. The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested. Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.” He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added. Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added. He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said. “The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. “The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”

cRaZy Fads

Great John! Looks like you're doing what's right for you! By "archiving", I'm just referring to a way that some folks may deal with their collections. Even tho hard copies are available (CDs, DVDs, etc), some folks like to have immediate access to a complete - sometimes huge - collection of their audio. This would be archiving for the casual collector. If you're involved in actually creating sound, then HD collection (as well as DVD audio) can be a great way to go too. Anyway, it sounds like you've got the situation under control! best, Rod

Yeah, and the Prius is one of the lame things about Toyota. Sorry John that you made that assumption about the iPod and AAC. AAC is not a proprietary format. AAC is the audio format connected to the MP4 standard which was created many years before Apple's introduction. Because of Apple's forward thinking (and it's popularity amongst audio/video users), it was thru them that it was introduced to the general consumer. The good side is that you have better quality files with more stability. This is great for archiving purposes (I'm not sure if this is what you're doing with your harddrive collection), but if you're interested in listening on a variety of platforms, then I'd use a high MP3, AIFF, or WAV for that and make an extra AAC for your archive (if this is what you're doing). best, Rod

Hi John. The AAC format is good if you want good clear sound that won't take up a lot of room on your hard drive. You have control over the bit rate just like MP3s and they are perfect for iPods. Of course, if you plan on playing a burned disc of tunes on, let's say, a standalone CD player, then that's where you'll run into probs. At the moment, there is only one company that allows you to play AAC files on their car stereos for instance, so you may want to consider using MP3 as your choice if you want to break out some. Also, you never want to convert AAC into MP3s because you'll be removing more of the sound. It'll sound terrible. Best to go straight from the original recording. Rod

Hmmm...maybe it has to do with the fact that when a Gates product has a problem, it's usually related to work-based or security-based concerns, while the Jobs problems usually are related to cosmetic/design ones? While it's a drag that the screen scratches so easily, at least it doesn't slow down your work speed, or unexpectedly crash, or dit you to death with cornball graphics, or keep itself wide open to security issues, or... Like I've said before - anything with a small screen, iPod, camera, et. al, should have a screen protector immediately mounted on to it just in case. I agree with Skid on some of his points: the "copy protection" scheme where you need special software (not endorsed by Apple) to copy audio files from your friends is a stupid "piracy" issue... the email address thing is just one of those things that shows up in lots of software - it's not some weird exclusive iTunes thing. OK, so it takes up 25 MB of space...what's that nowadays? and, yup, there are all kinds of other ways to rip music out there, but this is like saying that there are all kinds of other ways to drive cars out there - uh, huh... Apple has it's problems - mostly those due to sucking RIAA's disc - but the ease of use between iPod and iTunes is incredible whether you're just dropping tunes into it or the jillion ways of sorting your playlists. It's a tie as to which is the audio product of the decade. Until Gates quites making the AMC's of the computer world, I'll stay with my Mac.

IX - 9 - you damn intellektules kill me. The music's so nice, you had to play it twice. ← Well, you know, I had to look more than twice at those Roman numerals before I really got it. Thought it might've been a printing mistake (which I would've been OK with), but the music's the same. Ho, hum...sent a note to Mosaic...

Hope so. I took a picture and will send them a link to it for verification. I've been lazily moving thru the discs and got to number 9 and started checking the discs themselves. Last two discs are marked IX with the same music.

Did any of you get two disc 9's? I have no Disc 8. hrruuumph...