Christiern

Sounds to me like this recently failed American Idol wannabe is determined to have her 15 minutes by any means necessary.

On a TV interview that was going slow, I asked Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson if they had a roach problem at their house--it generated into a lively, loose, informative interview. My advice: do thorough research and come up with unexpected questions (preferably related to the subject(s)). Sometime dragging out a good name or incident from their past will trigger them. Mainly, the people you are interviewing should know that you know more than the average person. I have had my share of being interviewed, and the usual questions get routine ressponses from me--like, "how did Bessie really die? Throw me a curve and I'm off (in a positive way).

Sad news...

Congratulations.... I did a phone interview with Anita many years ago. When I called her, she asked me to call back, because she had just poured a martini and she didn't want it to go bad. I called her back and got a good interview.

Could it be that "cheezy" is being equated to "commercially successful?" There has long been a tendency by some jazz fans to put down anything that the wider public seems to go for. "Commercial" may still be a dirty word in jazz scene lingo.

If your phone don't ring, it's me. --Country music song title.

He had about him the look of an unmade Bedouin. -- Peter Cook (describing Lawrence of Arabia)

Thanks Lon, yes that is definitely Harry Lim.

Just returned from a great barbecued meal, jazz, exquisite wine, and inspiring conversation at the house of nearby-living friends. One of the deserts was the star spangled banner replicated with whipped cream, blueberries and raspberries, carefully laid out on a naughty bed of sponge cake and cognac.

HAPPY 4th! To every Organissimite (Organissimo-ist?) I'm off to a cool barbecue on a steamy New York day.

Behind Condon? There is no face there...what makes you think it's Lim?

How's this?

Update:Amazon has finally removed Heaney's bit of venom.

Some of you will recall him, others will have him on disc, introducing Duke, and others. I have good memories of him from the 1960s. Now he is gone. Couldn't find any details, but someone will.

There was a time when you would have been right. Actually, I still--but with increasing rarity--get my Vs and Ws mixed up. I used to drink whee-O and ginger while watching TWhee, but I was never known to exclaim "Vot a svinging band it iss dis Bassie!" BTW There was also a time when I thought the No Standing sign meant that one could not stand and wait for a bus--I used to stand against a building until the bus was almost there, then run out to catch it! And I was 27 years old! End of true confessions.

I always used water--it works. We didn't have air cannisters back in my 78 rpm days, but I imagine that would work well, too.

Not a still from America's Castles, but will she have a cell phone?

FYI Fresh Air today - Tue. July 1, 2003

On a hot summer night in Perugia, I attended an outdoor concert that was a part of the Umbria 84 Jazz Festival. Eliane Elias was in the middle of a ever so tinkly, very boring piano solo when this enormous dragon fly--the biggest I've ever seen--alit on the keyboard. Ms. Elias jumped back from the piano. There was applause. Mine was for the fly and I have a feeling that I was not alone in my enthusiasm for it. B) In Haiti, a giant spider and an equally large bug, of a species unknown to me, decided to have an encounter in my hotel bathroom. It was a small hotel that left its guests alone at night, so there was nobody around to deal with these creatures, and I was certainly not going near them. I ended up spending the night seated on a bench outside. I couldn't live in a region that has large bugs--New York water bugs are bad enough, but I have only seen three in the 40 years I have lived in this apartment. Now all I have is the occasional computer bug, but my Macs keep that to a minimum. I once saw a mouse, so I bought one of those mouse hotels, or whatever they call them, a rectangular piece of plastic with glue on it. It didn't take long for the mouse to get stuck there, but I could not get myself to pick it up for disposal. When I called a neighbor, he said "You afraid of a little mouse? I'll be right over. He came over right away, but when I showed him the mouse, he said, "It's still alive! I'm not going near it." So I asked him if it would make a difference if the mouse was unconscious, and he said it would. I then did a terrible thing, I took a roach spray, Raid™ (this was before Combat™ liberated me), and aimed at the mouse. It didn't faint, but the Raid dissolved the glue, so it ran off!

Clearly, it is not the children these clowns care about. The final paragraph kinda sorta sez it all. Tukwila school to get PCs as Mac imbroglio continues By Peter Cohen pcohen@maccentral.com June 27, 2003 11:20 am ET Earlier this month MacCentral brought readers news originally reported by the King County Journal that a school in Tukwila, Wash. was considering turning down a US$43,000 grant awarded one of its teachers to buy free Macs, since the Mac grant conflicted with the school's Windows-only IT policy. In a followup article posted today, reporter Nora Doyle noted that the superintendent has come up with a compromise, although it's one unlikely to please Mac advocates. The final decision about the Macs hasn't been made yet, either. The brouhaha erupted earlier this year when a teacher at Foster High School in Tukwila, Wash. applied for and received an educational grant that awarded his school US$43,000 in free Macintosh computer hardware and compatible laser printers. Alas, the teacher had no idea at the time that the school already had in place an IT policy that required new purchases to be Windows PCs. Parents interviewed for the original report called the Tukwila school's policy "asinine" and questioned the logic in turning away $43,000 of free computer hardware regardless of platform, especially given the budgetary constraints of many schools including Tukwila's. The school superintendent contended that a homogeneous platform reduces IT costs. Details about the grant were to be put forth before a school board meeting. Superintendent Michael Silver told teachers that they'd be able to have 30 Windows PCs donated by The Boeing Co., which donates surplus computers to nearby school districts. The school district also agreed to put up $3,000 to buy new laser printers. "It took about a minute for three Foster High School teachers to decide they'd accept the superintendent's offer," wrote Doyle. Teacher Jeff Heinman, who applied for and received the Mac grant, told Doyle that he'd rather have new Macs than used PCs, but "I'd rather have 30 PCs than nothing." He said he hopes the school district will accept the Mac-specific grant regardless and find a good place for the Macs. Doyle noted that a loophole in the school district's IT plan permits Macs to be kept at teacher's desks, libraries and a graphics classroom. The school board hasn't yet made a final decision about the fate of the Mac-specific $43,000 grant. Doyle reports that the costs associated with supporting such a decision will be examined during a school board meeting scheduled for July 8th. Tukwila is a Puget Sound community located about a half hour's drive southwest of Redmond, Wash., home of Microsoft Corp.'s corporate headquarters.

Benchmark sparring: Intel's reaction to the G5 Apple's public designation of the Power Macintosh G5 as the "world's fastest personal computer" accompanied by a set of stellar benchmarks for the new machines, seems to have evoked the investigative spirit in a number of interested parties. Among them - the full gamut of major processor manufacturers including Intel, AMD and Motorola; media outlets of all sizes; and most importantly, those with actual access to the still publicly unavailable machines. We contacted Intel to find out what they thought of Apple's benchmarks, and the industry's reaction. Naturally, the company had no official comments of the own at the time, noting that they had no G5 machines to test, and were merely reading through the crossfire with the rest of us. They later referred us to an analyst with the Gartner Group, Martin Reynolds, who we naturally expected would be highly skeptical of Apple's claims and present some Intel backing. Hours later, a Gartner report written by Reynolds was issued, containing this statement: "These models certainly equal Intel's advanced 875 platform and should allow Apple to go until 2005 without a major platform refresh." The "875" platform to which Reynolds refers, is the chipset backing Intel's current line of top-end Pentium 4 offerings. It sports an 800 MHz frontside bus - compared to the G5's 1 GHz - with support for dual-channel DDR400 RAM. It is unclear to us whether this means Intel is admitting Apple may have a superior platform -- at least for now.

I just received this photo of Toshiko and Lew Tabackin:

If you have Classic 9, you should be able to boot on it. My newest machine (a 1 GHz dual) did not come with Classic 9, and I decided not to install it--forcing myself to make a serious switch to X. On my other machines, however, I do have Classic 9. Classic 9 is not inherently a part of X. I know that sounds confusing, but if you see Classic 9 as a Startup Disk option, you can boot into that system. If you don't see it there, you need to install it (if you feel a need to use it). Which Mac are you running? Unless you bought it within the past few months, it should have come equipped with Classic 9.

The Commodore Music Shop--I was only there a couple of times, but it had a lot of good vibes. B)

From OS X, go to System Preferences and select Startup Disk. When the Startup Disk window comes down, select OS 9, and restart your machine. That will boot you into OS 9 until you repeat the procedure and select OS X as your startup.