Dave Garrett

Willman has a pretty interesting backstory. He was basically a programmer/stathead that started up the Baseball Savant site as a hobby, and wound up parlaying it into his current position with MLB (the Savant site moved under the mlb.com umbrella when he was hired there). This is from a couple of years ago, when he was still in hobbyist mode: The Savant of Spray Charts: Meet the New Star of Baseball Analytics

The Rockets, but the Western Conference is, as usual, brutal. They really put a no-doubt smackdown on OKC tonight, and given that they've pretty much owned the Thunder all season, I'd expect that trend to continue for the remainder of the first round. But then they'll be faced with the Spurs, who should never be counted out come playoff time. The Rockets were only 1-3 vs. the Spurs this season, but all four games were very close (three of them decided by two points) and could have easily gone either way. If they make it past the Spurs, they'll almost certainly be facing Golden State in the conference finals. The Rockets barely avoided getting swept by GS in the first round last year, and although this year's team is a completely different animal than last year's was, they've still only managed one win vs. the Warriors this year, and the three losses weren't that close. Overall, I think this is the best team they've had in years, but they need to figure out how to take the next step of beating the Warriors in a playoff series. I expect whoever wins the battle of the West will likewise come out on top in the Finals this year.

Yeah, that site is normally a good resource for questions like this, but in this case the cast member list is a bit of a patchwork. I can overlook that, since as far as I know the site has been built and maintained by one guy as a hobby.

He is, and at 88 is the oldest surviving cast member. http://www.wa-wd.com/list.asp?list=Armlaughin

Apparently Amazon Canada briefly had it listed for around $55-60 at several points during the week. More than a few people over at the Hoffman forum managed to place orders at that price, and were half expecting the orders to be cancelled as a pricing mistake, but as of yesterday I don't think that had happened to anyone yet.

That's exactly what I said to a friend in email yesterday - the new super-duper 6-disc set has 2 discs of session material, but the Purple Chick version had 4 discs of sessions/outtakes/different mixes/multitracks. Between that and the fact that I'm not too excited about a new remix (even if it is by Giles Martin), I'm lukewarm about this set, especially at the asking price. But I'll reserve judgment until it's out there and people have had some time to digest it.

Sorry about that. I had thought that the paywall was bypassed for non-subscribers under certain circumstances when an article was shared. Try Google's cached version instead: Link

Houston loses another piece of music history, the Bronze Peacock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDxDYIQL6Nc (edit: crap, just realized whoever uploaded it disabled embedding)

Wow, I have been looking for a copy of that book for years, to no avail. Just poked around a bit and ran across one listed at an online vendor in Brazil, but there's no mention anywhere of international shipping being offered. Guess I need to attempt to construct a semi-coherent inquiry in Portuguese and shoot them an email.

Yes, the Disk Union boxes are empty, although you will frequently find them sold along with the discs they were designed to contain - that's how I got the Sanders box. If memory serves, they're referred to as "promo" boxes because Disk Union offered them as an extra to customers who bought the complete set of discs they were intended to house.

I think there's more to Lewis than the lazy "the French love him" trope that usually gets trotted out whenever the subject of his films comes up, as if no thinking person could possibly find much value in broad comedies where subtlety tends to be in short supply. But both his solo films as well as those with Martin aren't well-known, for which blame can largely be assigned to their spotty availability on home video during the period when home video has been at its peak popularity. There have been two DVD box sets of the Martin & Lewis films, which went out of print and were later resurrected as manufactured-on-demand releases by Warner Archive, but those seem to be out of print now as well. Likewise, there was a 10-film box set of Lewis' films which came and went. Aside from THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, I don't think most people could name a Lewis film. A very different type of "Lewis film" (he wasn't involved in the production but is certainly the protagonist) that may be of interest is 2014's TELETHON, a behind-the-scenes look at what went on in preparation for the 1989 MDA telethon:

Just noticed that FLACs of the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz are available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/Smithsonian-Collection-of-Classic-Jazz-lossless

Yep. These are status updates, not PMs. If you use the "new since last visit" option to view posts, they show up there with the notation " posted a status update to " (paraphrasing the language here from memory).

I hear you. I have unofficial DVDs of some of the Warner TV series of the late 50s/early 60s (Hawaiian Eye, etc.), and the quality leaves a lot to be desired (think multigeneration VHS dubs that have been converted to a digital format, with compression artifacts added in the process), but when that's all that's available, you make do. I am amused every time I run across comments from someone who swears that they just can't watch something if it's not available on Blu-ray or streaming in HD.

I'd be curious to know how these look when you get them. I wouldn't expect HD quality from a 70s TV show, but I've been on the fence about whether to get this (much cheaper) reissue or the earlier set released by VEI. The earlier one also contains the two pilot episodes, but more importantly, it has almost twice the number of discs, leading me to suspect that they used a lot more compression on the reissue.

Lon is correct - it's one of the promo boxes issued by Disk Union to house the Japanese Impulse gatefold mini-LP reissues in the "Pharoah Sanders Collection" series. There's a presumably complete list of Disk Union boxes here: http://www.minilps.net/japan-box-etc-authorised/disk-union-box

Quite a few that have been mentioned already, and a couple that haven't:

You don't have to sync your entire iTunes library to your phone - you can selectively sync only certain songs or albums. So you can maintain a large music library in iTunes but only load a small portion of it on your phone: https://www.lifewire.com/itunes-sync-only-certain-songs-1999555 Also, to add to what Scott said earlier about backing up your phone to iTunes on your computer, IMO an iTunes backup is preferable to an iCloud backup because an iCloud backup is not as complete as an iTunes backup is - I forget the details, but iCloud backups only capture key data like Contacts, Photos, etc. If you want to be able to reset your phone to factory settings and restore it exactly as it was including all app data and settings, you need to do an iTunes backup. I highly recommend doing an iTunes backup before every iOS upgrade as well, as I've had to restore a phone from a backup before when an upgrade bricked the phone.

IIRC the renamings were for legal reasons, a loophole that somehow allowed them to release MOFO, Lumpy Money, and Greasy Love Songs without breaching the agreement the Zappa trust had with Ryko/Warner.

Likewise, after a couple of hours of trying to reload the dead.net page punctuated with occasional swearing. I can't believe they weren't able to figure out that the site was going to get slammed as soon as this was announced, and at least temporarily scale up capacity to handle the demand beforehand. I'm still pissed off about the Europe '72 fiasco, and am not entirely convinced that I won't wind up empty-handed with this one as well despite having an order confirmation in hand.

(shamelessly stolen from Usenet) Funeral funeral!

Hail and farewell.

The complete-series Blu-ray set of the Dick Van Dyke show is a significant upgrade over the older DVDs. It looks amazing. It's been on Amazon (very) briefly in the past for as low as $49.99, but has more often been in the $100+ range. If you're a fan of the show and run across a used set at a bargain price, you won't regret taking the plunge once you've seen how good it looks.