The Magnificent Goldberg

Can you post an address please, Chris? I have been using Image Shack, but you only get a measly thumb on the face of the board - though you can click and get it full size. MG

Big Pit is still open. I haven't been there but my wife has. Incredible, she said. There's also the Rhondda Heritage Park, at Trehafod, halfway between here and Pontypridd, which is based on an old mine. I remember getting someone to put together some money for that in about 1990. (In those days, the Rhondda had a Communist mayor - a nice lady called Mattie.) That one's still open, too. Cultural tourism is very much the game now in these areas. Stuff like that is SERIOUS in old mining communities. Everyone's life depends on how well each man works and contributes to the safety of all. This breeds incredible solidarity, which goes well beyond the mine and the union. One of my former bosses, a Merthyr Tydfil man, used to say that, when a bunch of blokes gathered in a pub, you could always tell the civil servants and the miners - while all other groups would talk about beer, fags, football, women and how to get from A to B, those two groups would invariably talk shop. People breaking that solidarity are completely beyond the pale. MG

Bill Jennings & Leo Parker - Billy in the Lion's den - King (Swingtime France) What a joyous bunch of music! MG

Get well soon, Nancy. MG

We lived in our previous flat for 31 years before moving here a couple of years ago. Good God, the stuff we turfed out! The funny thing is, we moved from a two bedroom flat to a four bedroom house and had to buy hardly any furniture - and we've got a garage full of stuff! MG

Lucky man! MG

I got the book late last year; a reflection of the respect I have for Larry. I'm fairly out of sympathy with the reflective way Larry listens to music, but it was good to read it. And there are times Larry GETS your guts and you think, "pooh gosh, I wish I could write like that." MG

MG

The browser is not "connected to the board" because HTTP is a stateless protocol. When you navigate to an organissimo-page your browser sends an HTTP-request which the web server hopefully receives. Upon receiving a request the server generates an HTTP-object which may include a "Set Cookie"-header and is sent back to your browser (HTTP-response). If your browser allows a cookie to be set it will be stored on your computer and will be included on subsequent HTTP-request that are sent to that server (unless the cookie expired or was deleted). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP#HTTP_session_state http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html So, something's deleting our cookies or they're expiring? MG No, I didn't suggest that they're expiring (if this would be the case more users around here would have that problem). This was a general response to your HTTP-"theory". Check your cookie settings. Firefox: Edit | Preferences | Privacy Opera: Preferences | Advanced | Cookies IE6 (probably similar in IE7): Tools | Internet Options | Privacy I can't see how it can be a cookie setting because it happens at random - sometimes I have no problem, sometimes I have a problem. MG

That's right, for my money. "Junkie" is a great documentary book. The other stuff OUGHT to be total rubbish, but it speaks, even the stuff with Byron Gysin. And the humour that 7/4 (was it 7/4?) pointed out comes through clearly and frequently. Am I dying, mister. MG

Argh! Missed it. But happy UN-birthday for today, Kyo. MG

Searching for African music produces some amusing results, I find. MG

The browser is not "connected to the board" because HTTP is a stateless protocol. When you navigate to an organissimo-page your browser sends an HTTP-request which the web server hopefully receives. Upon receiving a request the server generates an HTTP-object which may include a "Set Cookie"-header and is sent back to your browser (HTTP-response). If your browser allows a cookie to be set it will be stored on your computer and will be included on subsequent HTTP-request that are sent to that server (unless the cookie expired or was deleted). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP#HTTP_session_state http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html So, something's deleting our cookies or they're expiring? MG

And while we're on the subject, inside Spillers Records, the world's oldest record shop (est 1894) MG

Beautiful downtown Tonyrefail on a busy lunchtime MG

A bit of history, Chris, since you're interested, but no photos of my own. Thatcher came to power in 1979 on a wave of anti-unionist feeling (not wholly unjustified at the time). She wanted to break the unions. A good deal of legislation went through to reduce union immunities and recruitment/negotiation rights. The miners were the most extreme left wing union in Britain - many Communist and other extreme left wingers among them at grass roots and senior levels - also the most militant and mutually solid. It had been a miners' strike that had brought down a Tory government in 1974, so Arthur Scargill, boss of the union and a leading member of the Socialist Workers' Party, was no 1 on her hate list. A further strike was instigated in 1984 by proposals to close 20 mines and, after a long, bitter struggle, with a good deal of social disorder (there were fears at one time that the Government would call out the Army), the unions lost. But that 20 was only the first of many closures. Michael Heseltine closed most of what remained of Britain's deep mines in 1994. Effectively, the Thatcher government closed the industry prematurely, using North Sea oil, not to fund much needed infrastructure investment, but to replace coal, in order to break this union. There were about 600 coal mines in South Wales in the 1920s. From about the 1890s, Cardiff was the world's busiest coal port and had the only Coal Exchange in the world (that's why it has the world's oldest record shop). Only one deep mine remained open in South Wales after 1994 - Tower Colliery, Hirwaun in the Cynon Valley - and only because it was bought out by the miners themselves, forming an Anarcho-Syndicalist Workers' Co-operative (it closed a couple of months ago, having been worked out). South Wales is still producing energy. The mines have been replaced by windmills. This is the view across the valley from our estate. And now a couple of references: Miners' strike 1984 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3494024.stm Tower Colliery http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/southeast/sites...rcolliery.shtml Oh, so there IS one of my pictures MG

To me, Hank is a great Hard Bop player, but a crummy Soul Jazz player - "Reach out" is a very poor attempt at Soul Jazz. But "Soul station", like "Workout" seem to me to occupy a jazz space similar to many of Horace Silver's albums and some of Cannonball's - they're simultaneously major elements of both the Hard Bop and Soul Jazz traditions. What's really RIGHT about "Soul station" and "Workout" is the lovely, catchy tunes, which the ordinary, everyday listener can really get with and sing along to. (And those grooves.) Mobley's tunes are really quite a turnoff for your everyday listener. His fifties material I find overtly impenetrable, whether it be the material on the Mosaic box, which I haven't got for understandable reasons, or the stuff on the B side of "All night long". But in these two albums, Hank's tunes are really grab your guts stuff. Comparing them with "Roll call" which was recorded in between times, only "My groove, your move" has this same quality. It's not just the tunes, of course. One of the things that always occurs to me when I'm listening to either album is how much like Gene Ammons, in attitude, not style of course, Hank is on them. I would really have loved to have heard Jug do "Dig dis", "Uh huh" or "Greasin' easy". Having said all that, my favourite Mobley is not one of these but "Thinking of home" MG

Blue Trane Not my favourite Trane, but I just felt like listening to it. MG

Donald Vails Choraleers - In deep water - Savoy orig MG

And no one stole it? Must be a big problem for Mosaic buyers if there's no one at home in the day. MG

Joan Jett Wanda Jackson Carmen Electra

Internet Explorer for me. And my superb methodology doesn't work! obo110x MG

Sounds like an extremely complex process. I can see trucking in the potatoes, but after that I don't understand the need for the rest of what you described. I can't imagine this being profitable at all. That's exactly the point, YOU, and I, can't imagine, the MARKET does. Let's say that a food big corporate bought the small company. The cheapest potatoes come from Germany, until now maybe tomorrow they will come from Poland, the big corporate get money from EU developping funds for poor areas, like Sicily, or maybe they have some lower taxation, or the job is cheaper, or the laws aginst pollution are looser. So they move the drying process of all their potato chips brands over there. Let's make the same reasoning for every places I named. Maybe in Switzerland they have the best, modern and economic frying plants of the whole europe, maybe they want that the italian chips remain italian, so they packed them in Italy and wrote down on the packet "Made in Italy", and charged you 50 cents more at the supermarket for it. Add the fact that most of the companies has lower transportation costs because they don't own their trucks anymore, they rent them. Then you can do some calculations: for a small company all these would be crazy, but for a big corporate with dozens of potato chips brands? This is the concept of delocalization, if you consider more complex products like cars or DVD players, you'll discover that inside a Cadillac, proudly U.S. made, or in a Fiat FWIW, there are hundreds of parts coming from all over the world, the same plants does brakes for both Cadillac and Fiat, perhaps in Taiwan. We moved from a small world with industrial areas where all the third parts were produced to a global world. The point is that in order to move all this stuff we need way too much oil for trains, trucks, ships, and the long term social cost could be unbareable for us: global warming, desertification, pollutions, etc. Absolutely right, on every point, Porcy! MG

Clorinda Thisbe Cinderella

Noah Howard Frankie Howard Lurkio Ah! Nostalgia!!! MG