Christiern

Perhaps even worse than the many, many shallow programs he produced is the fact that he brought us Tori Spelling.

Allen, if you were about to read both books (Dufty's and Otis's) and had before you two huge grains of salt, one bigger than the other, which one would you apply what book?

AOL has been bad news for many years. I invariably run into a problem when I send files (even simple text files) to AOL addresses. For some ridiculous reason they convert the files into another format and--on Macs, at least--they emerge as garbage. The only files that stand a chance against AOL are PDFs.

For one thing, they probably would have to pay for use of notes and/or covers (depending on ownership), but it would also be impractical, considering the fact that many Mosaic releases are culled from several albums.

Sounds familiar--what's the name of the movie?

That is the most moronic statement I've ever seen on this board, outside of the political forum. It's a form of transportation, for crying out loud. Anything else you'd like to ban? Skateboards? Bicycles? Perhaps walking itself is a form egotism; after all, you have absolutely no protection. Certainly professional athletes should never bathe, as the bathtub is where most accidents occur anyway. Frankly, I find nothing wrong with BruceW's post, but the response is truly moronic. Sorry, Moose.

They are noisy, too. Here are some photos from today. This is 104th Street, Jodie Foster retreated to her trailer and they are blowing wind into the trees (we have tiny trees on the block, but they brought some big ones--on the right). This afternoon they will will shoot in front of my building, so they parked a wind machine right in front. My doorman likes the machine.

I don't know which band you are referring to, but you are right about Wells having played in a Snowden band. Here is a partial list of players who at various times were Snowden sidemen. Sonny Greer Otto Hardwicke Duke Ellington Count Basie Jimmy Lunceford Claude Hopkins Frankie Newton Joe "Tricky" Sam Nanton Bubber Miley Chick Webb Benny Carter Cliff Jackson Garvin Bushell Fats Waller Joe Garland Keg Johnson Jimmy Harrison Prince Robinson Gus Aiken Sid Catlett Roy Eldridge Al Sears Rex Stewart and Dickie Wells

OP-ED COLUMNIST June 15, 2006 Where the Hogs Come First By BOB HERBERT Tar Heel, N.C. Think pork. Sizzling bacon and breakfast sausage. Juicy chops and ribs and robust holiday hams. The pork capital of the planet is this tiny town in the Cape Fear River basin, not far from the South Carolina border. Spending a few days in Tar Heel and the surrounding area — dotted with hog farms, cornfields and the occasional Confederate flag — is like stepping back in time. This is a place where progress has slowed to a crawl. Tar Heel's raison d'être (and the employment anchor for much of the region) is the mammoth plant of the Smithfield Packing Company, a million-square-foot colossus that is the largest pork processing facility in the world. You can learn a lot at Smithfield. It's a case study in both the butchering of hogs (some 32,000 are slaughtered there each day) and the systematic exploitation of vulnerable workers. More than 5,500 men and women work at Smithfield, most of them Latino or black, and nearly all of them undereducated and poor. The big issue at Smithfield is not necessarily money. Workers are drawn there from all over the region, sometimes traveling in crowded vans for two hours or more each day, because the starting pay — until recently, $8 and change an hour — is higher than the pay at most other jobs available to them. But the work is often brutal beyond imagining. Company officials will tell you everything is fine, but serious injuries abound, and the company has used illegal and, at times, violent tactics over the course of a dozen years to keep the workers from joining a union that would give them a modicum of protection and dignity. "It was depressing inside there," said Edward Morrison, who spent hour after hour flipping bloody hog carcasses on the kill floor, until he was injured last fall after just a few months on the job. "You have to work fast because that machine is shooting those hogs out at you constantly. You can end up with all this blood dripping down on you, all these feces and stuff just hanging off of you. It's a terrible environment. "We've had guys walk off after the first break and never return." Mr. Morrison's comments were echoed by a young man who was with a group of Smithfield workers waiting for a van to pick them up at a gas station in Dillon, S.C., nearly 50 miles from Tar Heel. "The line do move fast," the young man said, "and people do get hurt. You can hear 'em hollering when they're on their way to the clinic." Workers are cut by the flashing, slashing knives that slice the meat from the bones. They are hurt sliding and falling on floors and stairs that are slick with blood, guts and a variety of fluids. They suffer repetitive motion injuries. The processing line on the kill floor moves hogs past the workers at the dizzying rate of one every three or four seconds. Union representation would make a big difference for Smithfield workers. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union has been trying to organize the plant since the mid-1990's. Smithfield has responded with tactics that have ranged from the sleazy to the reprehensible. After an exhaustive investigation, a judge found that the company had threatened to shut down the entire plant if the workers dared to organize, and warned Latino workers that immigration authorities would be alerted if they voted for a union. The union lost votes to organize the plant in 1994 and 1997, but the results of those elections were thrown out by the National Labor Relations Board after the judge found that Smithfield had prevented the union from holding fair elections. The judge said the company had engaged in myriad "egregious" violations of federal labor law, including threatening, intimidating and firing workers involved in the organizing effort, and beating up a worker "for engaging in union activities." Rather than obey the directives of the board and subsequent court decisions, the company has tied the matter up on appeals that have lasted for years. A U.S. Court of Appeals ruling just last month referred to "the intense and widespread coercion prevalent at the Tar Heel facility." Workers at Smithfield and their families are suffering while the government dithers, refusing to require a mighty corporation like Smithfield to obey the nation's labor laws in a timely manner. The defiance, greed and misplaced humanity of the merchants of misery at the apex of the Smithfield power structure are matters consumers might keep in mind as they bite into that next sizzling, succulent morsel of Smithfield pork.

It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing) Doin' the New Low Down Runnin' Wild Diga Diga Doo Them There Eyes Tishomingo Blues C-Jam Blues Sweet Georgia Brown Alabamy Bound Twelfth Street Rag Bugle Call Rag Dear Old Southland

Back then, as you may recall, old wives were claiming that ashes are good for the carpet.

Here's a somewhat blurry (I never mastered lightmeters) picture of Elmer in my Philadelphia apartment. I still have that tape recorder, a British Ferrograph.

They're still at it ... The bottom picture is taken from the front door to my building.

Yesterday's crime scene is today's movie set. You may recognize the subway stop from the NYT photo in post #1. These are some photos I took about 2 hours ago--the film people have occupied about six blocks around my building (seen in the background here) and filled them with wind machines, trees, stacks of cement, a cement mixer, wood planks, bricks, and many, many huge trailers. One of these pictures is from my window.

This photo was taken yesterday afternoon, a block away from where I live. A young tourist from Texas had been brutally stabber (12 times) on a southbound C Train, the assailant, who changed the young man's life for no apparent reason, had fled at the previous stop. A block away, where I live, a rather large crew of workmen were putting the finishing touches on their elaborate conversion of an urban garden into a film set (they even brought their own trees). Tomorrow, they will be filming scenes there and in the street for "The Brave One," an "urban" WB thriller starring Jodie Foster, Terence Howard, Naveen Andrews and Mary Steenburgen. These parallel events in my hood reminded me of something that happened a few years ago, when they were filming a TV crime drama across the street from me. Several actors were involved, including about ten who were dressed in NYPD uniforms. There was take after take, but suddenly a group of real uniformed police officers ran into the street from Central Park. They were chasing a real suspect! It was like a comedy routine with real and fake cops in the same mix. What's happening in your neighborhood?

Thank you, Larry--if it pleased your discriminating ears, it must be more than okay. I might add that the banjo was one of my least favorite instruments until I hear what Elmer could do with it.

Sorry about the size of the covers, I'll try to reduce them. Anyway, what I have heard, so far, is excellent ... Edmond Hall Edmond Hall, Omer Simeon, Herbert Hall (clarinets); Dick Cary (piano); Jimmy Raney (guitar); Al HAll (bass); Jimmy Crawford (drums). 10 selections recorded June 25/26, 1959 and originally issued on the Rae-Cox label as "Rumpus On Rampart Street." Johnny Windhurst (trumpet); Edmond Hall (clarinet); Vic Dickenson (trombone); Kenny Kersey (piano); John Field (bass); Jimmy Crawford (drums). 7 selections originally broadcast over WMEX from Boston's Savoy Café in May, 1949. Buck Clayton Buck Clayton (trumpet); Joe Bushkin (piano); Milt Hinton (bass); Jo Jones (drums). 9 selections, 7 of which were recorded live at the Embers in December, 1953.

Sorry, when people do idiotic things like that, I have no sympathy for them. The man was obviously a fool.

"tranemonk," it seems to me that he worst decision was made by you, not Mosaic. The label specializes in issuing "complete" sets of recordings--had yo thought about what that entails, you would have realized that there is almost always some dross that is only included in order to adhere to the concept. Surely, you did not think that Dinah had a perfect record of perfection, as it were? If Mosaic has made a bad decision, it was probably to cater to completists, but the customer is forewarned.

I'm not so sure that the book's title is fair. That makes me wonder about what's inside. I will read and return to this thread.

Best I can do is go back to 1956/57 ... That's me, but the car actually belonged to a Hawaiian friend stationed in Iceland.

It was Christmas, Tony was surrounded by most all who were dear to him. I really expected 3 wise guys to show up. Disappointing.

I first met Billy around 1964. I was conducting a fund-raising marathon at KPFA in Hollywood and had been on the air 12 hours straight. I was on the air with Ricardo Montalban, Elsa Lanchester, and a young Catholic priest who that week was on the cover of a lot of magazines because he had defied the Cardinal re some union issue. A young lady from the station came into the studio and handed me a Vee-Jay album to which was taped a note: "He is outside, let me know when you want him to come in." The artist was a very young, slim Billy Preston with a pomp hairdo, wearing a tapered, shiny suit with thin, thin lapels. I signaled for him to come into the studio and, looking at the album, introduced him as "a young man who has the most exciting organ ever!" Elsa let out a shriek, Montalban smiled, and the priest looked embarrassed. Well, it had been a 12-hour grind. Very sorry to see him go so soon and in such a way. BTW, the album title was "The Most Exciting Organ Ever," it just didn't come out right.

Jazz pianist Hilton Ruiz dies at 54 JANET McCONNAUGHEY Associated Press NEW ORLEANS - Jazz pianist and composer Hilton Ruiz, who excelled in a wide variety of styles from Afro-Cuban rhythms to the blues, died early Tuesday, never regaining consciousness after a fall in front of a French Quarter bar. He was 54. Ruiz, who had come to New Orleans to work on a Hurricane Katrina benefit project, had been comatose at East Jefferson General Hospital since he fell early May 19. He died about 3:50 a.m. Tuesday, agent Joel Chriss said in a telephone interview from New York. Although there were early reports that Ruiz might have been beaten, police said witnesses indicated he fell. Attorney Mary Howell, retained by his ex-wife and daughter, said last week that they, too, were convinced that Ruiz had accidentally tripped or fallen. Ruiz, of Teaneck, N.J., has been described as one of the most versatile musicians in jazz. "He's one of the few musicians on the scene that is equally at home in both the jazz genre and the Afro-Cuban genre in a complete sense. ... He really can play the blues, too. For real," said trombone player Steve Turre, a longtime friend. "There's a lot of people who dabble with both worlds, but very few can authentically deal with both. And he's one of them." The many musicians with whom Ruiz worked included Tito Puente, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus. He was featured on the 1997 video "The Best of Latin Jazz," and his song "Something Grand" was included on the soundtrack of the film "American Beauty." "I was pretty lucky in being exposed to a lot of different kinds of music, and studying them with good teachers," Ruiz said in a biography on the Telarc International Corp.'s Web site. Playing with Ruiz, bass player Leon Dorsey said, "I always knew I had to bring my `A' game to the table all the time. ... His musicality, artistry, passion - all those things were just melded, and they all happened at a very high level. All worked in perfect symmetry." Ruiz came to New Orleans on May 18 with Marco Matute, founder and producer of the M27 World label, to shoot video to go along with a Hurricane Katrina benefit CD, Howell said. "They spent the whole day filming, riding in carriages, talking to people about New Orleans," she said. She said Ruiz "got very involved in the situation here" after playing in a New York benefit concert. Trained in classical music as well as jazz, Ruiz played at Carnegie Recital Hall when he was 8 years old. His first recording, at age 14, was with a group called Ray Jay and the East Siders. His teachers included jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams; in his early 20s, he worked with saxophone player Rahsaan Roland Kirk. "All the music I enjoyed was part of the Rahsaan experience," Ruiz said in an interview for liner notes on his 2003 CD "Enchantment." "He played the music of Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. Real down-home blues, as they're called. The great composers of classical music. Music from all over the world - Africa, the Orient, the Middle East. We had to play all these musical flavors every night." Ruiz is survived by his daughter, Aida (pronounced "Ida"), and his ex-wife, also named Aida. Both had been with him in New Orleans since learning he was hospitalized.