Dave Garrett

When I was in a jazz survey class as an undergrad thirty years ago, we were assigned Marshall Stearns' The Story of Jazz (as well as Blues People). At the time, Stearns' book was itself thirty years old. Given when it was published, quite a bit of the book is devoted to the prehistory and early history of jazz.

Maybe your phone's been possessed by the ghost of Charles Demuth?

Ron Carter picks 10 faves from his 2,200 recordings

They've got that covered: https://www.bear-family.com/simpson-red-hello-i-m-red-simpson-5-cd.html

I haven't personally used it, but Hugin seems to have a lot of fans, and it's free. It also compares favorably feature-wise with other stitching software: Comparison of photo stitching software

I haven't read this yet, but keep meaning to check it out. Those who have an interest in baseball on the radio might be similarly inclined. Baseball on the Radio: Review of Crack of the Bat

The only way to fully appreciate LoA is in 70mm on a huge screen. Sadly, such opportunities have become vanishingly rare, although it's usually featured during the various 70mm film programs that crop up once or twice a year. Seeing it restored to its full large-format glory in 1989 was one of the most memorable filmgoing experiences I've ever had.

Mainspring Press has released a "Personal Use Edition" of Brian Rust's Jazz Records discography containing all entries from 1917-1934 into the public domain. It is available for free download in both PDF and DOC formats. Looks like they don't intend to publish a seventh edition, and are hoping to crowdsource future updates of the data set that's being released. The notice at the bottom of each page is confusing - they indicate they're placing the material into the public domain, but only for non-commercial uses, and they retain the rights to commercial publication? I'm not a copyright lawyer, but those appear to be conflicting statements. Seems like they should have released the material under a Creative Commons license rather than declaring it PD if their intent was to open up access but proscribe commercial use. More details here: https://78records.wordpress.com/2016/06/24/free-download-of-brian-rusts-jazz-records-discography-is-now-available/

For some unknown reason, assloads never seem to be Standard or Imperial, always metric.

Well, if you're not limiting yourself to officially released stuff, there's always the metric assload of shows at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead&tab=collection

Nice article from SI on Ken Griffey Jr.'s impending induction into the HOF: Ken Griffey Jr. prepares for his proper baseball sendoff as the Hall awaits

By all accounts she is still in good health and quite sharp mentally. Here's hoping that she continues to be so - she's really the last big-name living link to the golden age of Hollywood.

Yeah, more likely than not it's not the site itself that's the problem, but the fact that it was a site that he'd never purchased anything from before flagged it as an outlier in his usual usage pattern for that card, triggering the fraud alert. I've had the same experience as Lon, with one particular card triggering a fraud alert every time I place an order from an overseas vendor with it, despite having ordered from that vendor on multiple occasions previously. Another data point: my wife is travelling this week, and I got a VM from her bank requesting a return call. I immediately suspected that multiple out-of-state purchases on her card had triggered a fraud alert, which she confirmed after speaking to them. CC companies (and banks) closely track usage patterns, and it doesn't take much of a deviation from those usage patterns to raise a red flag. When that happens, they will frequently put a temporary freeze on the card in question until they can reach the cardholder to confirm that the card hasn't been stolen or otherwise compromised.

Amazon would be my first suggestion as well, assuming you're looking for a US vendor. eBay is also a good bet (there are 200 listings currently for "samsung galaxy tab 7 battery"), but assuming you're going to require shipment to Japan as opposed to a US address, that will rule out all the sellers who will not ship internationally.

Not exactly a bargain, but an observation on the apparent extinction of such at Half Price Books, a topic that's been lamented here before. Spotted in the locked case at my local Half Price Books today: a copy of the International Phonograph reissue of Hemphill's Dogon A.D. for $49.99. On the other hand, looking at the asking prices from third-party Amazon sellers, I guess that might be a bargain after all, but it wasn't that long ago that such titles would have slipped through the cracks there and been priced accordingly. Now everything gets looked up online, and they may have someone on staff that's reasonably knowledgeable about jazz - I did hear "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from Jackie Mac's Swing, Swang, Swingin' over the store's sound system while I was browsing.

I'd bet the battery's on its last legs. The batteries in smartphones and tablets aren't designed for longevity, as people tend to replace the entire device every year or two in the case of phones, somewhat less frequently in the case of tablets as they don't achieve perceived obsolescence quite so quickly as phones do. I have definitely experienced a very noticeable dropoff in the ability of batteries to hold a charge in every smartphone I've ever owned after two years. There are tutorials on YouTube documenting how to replace the battery in a Galaxy 7 tablet, for instance: If you're not up to tackling it yourself, are there not third-party electronics repair shops in Japan that specialize in phone/tablet repair? They're all over the place in the US, with the only caveat being that going that route almost always voids the device warranty, which wouldn't be an issue for you since the tablet is several years old. They usually charge much less than a factory service center for most common service tasks like battery or cracked screen replacement. Replacing a battery should certainly be much cheaper than buying a new tablet.

That lobby card makes it look like Lemmon and Holliday are in the midst of the gastrointestinal activity that the title sounds like. And Kim Novak's the only one of them that has the couth to be appalled.

Yeah, I should've been more clear about the distinction between rentals and gross. $4 million in 1963 dollars is roughly $31 million in 2016 dollars. By way of comparison, the top-grossing feature in 1963 was CLEOPATRA at $57.77 million, which is just shy of $450 million in 2016 dollars. Leaving aside CLEOPATRA's gargantuan production and marketing budget of $44 million and just comparing the grosses, that's the difference between a feature with niche appeal and one that had a much broader audience.

Taiyo Yuden announced a year ago that they were exiting the recordable media business. I would expect that whatever stock is still available at retailers, if any, is all that's left. http://www.yuden.co.jp/eu/cms/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/150611Withdrawal-from-the-Recording-Media-Business_HP_E.pdf

Wikipedia sez $2,000,000 US and Canada - usual caveats apply to relying on Wikipedia, but in this case they do cite Variety's box office data for top rental features of 1963. I had forgotten that it was actually nominated for the Palme D'Or at Cannes!

Mondo films were a whole genre unto themselves, and Mondo Cane was the great-grandaddy of them all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondo_film Not sure how "mainstream" Mondo Cane was - it predated the establishment of the familiar G/PG (originally GP)/R/X ratings, but I can't imagine it got very far beyond being pigeonholed as a transgressive curiosity on the arthouse circuit. The later films it spawned were certainly much more grindhouse fodder. Pauline Kael reviewed Mondo Cane, and didn't think much of it: "The Italian documentary-maker Gualtiero Jacopetti and his associates are actually documentary fakers: they set out to demonstrate how uncivilized the world is, and then fake the proofs. There's no shortage of available evidence, but they prefer titillating, shocking frauds. The grossness of the picture works to the advantage of the filmmakers, since it seems almost naïve to attack it."