7/4

I thought Cosmic Rays is a pizza joint in the Village.

And you started that one too. Stay away from the punch Big Al!

I guess I'll find out soon enough... :eye:

most important - who?

who? why? what?

There's a long standing ban on Christmas music in my house.

Same here - I hope next year is better!

Les Paul Jr.!

The Borrower Eric Clapton is not God - he's not even original, says Kieron Tyler Kieron Tyler Saturday December 1, 2007 Guardian Tomorrow's South Bank Show celebrates Eric Clapton. It's nothing new, the programme last broadcast a hagiography of him in 1987. He used to be called Slowhand, but perhaps he ought to be called Secondhand. The celebration of this cultural pilferer probably won't point out the level to which he can be uninspired, and objectionable. He's always been questionable company. In 1965, the Yardbirds were convinced that their third single, the groundbreaking For Your Love, would be a hit, with the potential to wow the masses. But the mix of bongos, harpsichords and tempo shifts was too much for their purist guitarist. Clapton quit. Yardbirds' drummer Jim McCarty said that "Eric had these R&B mod songs he wanted us to do. Him leaving was a relief. Eric would be sitting in the van not talking to anyone. You'd think he's so moody, he's such a pain, we're fed up with this." With that, the grumpy Clapton was free to pursue his muse. Except that it wasn't his muse. Clapton is a serial borrower. He even borrowed Jimi Hendrix's hair in 1967, perming his barnet to emulate the recently-arrived guitar hero. Most of his 1970s hits were chugging, Mogadon-paced covers: Bob Marley's I Shot The Sheriff, Dylan's Knockin' On Heaven's Door. His creativity with Cream, such as Strange Brew, were collaborations. Left to Clapton, Cream would have played half-hour versions of Robert Johnson's Crossroads. And the thrilling guitar on Layla was played by Duane Allman. When not channelling the talents of others, there's his tendency towards the lachrymose. If his song Wonderful Tonight, a tribute to his then wife Patti Boyd, articulated his true feelings, she must have been married to a man with all the complexity of a block of wood. Boyd's recent autobiography chronicles the control freakery that dominated the relationship, revealed his extra-marital affairs and his love of the bottle.More bizarre was his wearing of whites to watch cricket on TV. Pasta preceded viewing The Godfather. Another musical blub fest, Tears In Heaven, was at least written in response to what must have been a nightmare - his son Conor falling to his death from a 53rd-floor apartment in 1991. However, Clapton has no problem letting fly when he needs to get something off his chest. In 1976 - drunk and loose-lipped - he used a Birmingham concert to praise racist Tory Enoch Powell and declare that Britain was becoming a "black colony" and that he wanted "the foreigners out". (Handy that Hendrix was dead). Reports of this show led directly to the formation of Rock Against Racism. In 2004, he told Uncut mag that Powell was "outrageously brave", rather than dismiss his past comments as drunk ravings. Clapton's popularity is a mystery - there's no fire, no abandon, no musical identity. Given a platform, Clapton will either send you to sleep or offend your musical sensibilities with pap. But both of those must be better than hearing his pathetic political views.

Phaedra and Rubycon are from 74-75. Aqua by Edgar Froese is 74 - highly recommended.

December 1, 2007 On Religion Sunday Religion, Inspired by Saturday Nights By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN SAN FRANCISCO Beside the altar of the storefront church on Fillmore Street stand an electric piano, two basses, a drum kit and three microphones. The hymnal, such as it is, consists of a music book, open to a piece titled “Blues For Bechet.” And on the side wall hangs an icon of the congregation’s patron saint, a golden corona circling his head, as he holds a tenor saxophone with flames in its bell. This being a house of jazz as well as of God, the Sunday morning service starts on Sunday afternoon, early rising for any musician who played three sets on Saturday night. As the worshipers trickle in, whether regulars from the neighborhood or pilgrims from abroad, a call comes from behind the rear wall: “Let the procession be formed.” Then the ministers and deacons and acolytes stride into view, led by a rangy man with a tenor sax dangling from a strap around his clerical collar. He is Archbishop Franzo Wayne King, founder and pastor of this faith community, the St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church. For the next three hours, the service proceeds with an aesthetic that is half jam session and half revival meeting. A traditional Christian liturgy — including the Lord’s Prayer and readings from a Gospel and an Epistle — takes places amid a series of intense, almost incantatory performances of Coltrane compositions. “The kind of music you listen to is the person you become,” Mr. King says in his sermon. “When you listen to John Coltrane, you become a disciple of the anointed of God.” In the third row, Mikkel Holst understands. He has traveled from Copenhagen to San Francisco in no small part for this church. “It must be one of the best jazz experiences of my life,” Mr. Holst says after the service. “The funniest thing about it is, I’m not religious. But when I put on John Coltrane, a chill goes down my spine. I was thinking, if I lived here, I could see myself belonging.” So the Coltrane church is not a gimmick or a forced alloy of nightclub music and ethereal faith. Its message of deliverance through divine sound is actually quite consistent with Coltrane’s own experience and message. During a fervently creative life of just 41 years, Coltrane produced a body of performances and compositions that have remained deeply influential among jazz musicians and listeners, as well as devotees of improvisational rock. By now, 40 years after his death, he rests firmly in the canon of American music. In both implicit and explicit ways, Coltrane also functioned as a religious figure. Addicted to heroin in the 1950s, he quit cold turkey, and later explained that he had heard the voice of God during his anguishing withdrawal. In 1964, he recorded “A Love Supreme,” an album of original praise music in a free-jazz mode. Studying Eastern religions as well as Christianity, he went on to release more avant-garde devotional music on “Ascension,” “Om” and “Meditations.” In 1966, an interviewer in Japan asked Coltrane what he hoped to be in five years, and Coltrane replied, “A saint.” Franzo Wayne King, then, was simply the person who took Coltrane at his word. Growing up in Los Angeles, the son of a Pentecostal minister, he knew firsthand the importance of music in African-American Christianity. His own tastes, however, ran more to James Brown than jazz. That started changing the day in the early 1960s when Mr. King’s older brother, Charles, played him the Coltrane recording of “My Favorite Things.” Mr. King began to explore and appreciate Coltrane’s earlier work with Miles Davis. Even so, when a friend showed him the album “A Love Supreme,” Mr. King read the very religious liner notes and decided the music could not be for him. “I didn’t want to get on a God trip,” he recalled. “If I wanted that, I’d go to church. Because in my upbringing there was an erect divide between jazz and blues and the church. You had to choose one.” Or so he believed until 1966, when he took his girlfriend, Marina, on her birthday to hear Coltrane at a San Francisco club, the Jazz Workshop. A buddy who was the doorman seated them up front, and there Coltrane’s trademark “sheets of sound” washed over them, almost literally. “It was my sound baptism,” Mr. King recalled. In the wake of Coltrane’s death and newly married to Marina, Mr. King created a small congregation called Yardbird Temple in reference to the nickname of another jazz great, Charlie Parker. At that point, the followers worshiped Coltrane as an earthly incarnation of God, while considering Parker a kind of John the Baptist equivalent. Such a theology, of course, put Mr. King and his flock outside the boundaries of Christianity. He moved back inside them in the early 1980s, when he met George Duncan Hinkson, an archbishop in the African Orthodox Church. The denomination, founded in the late 19th century in South Africa, took root in America largely through Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement. Its adherents worship a black Christ. Ordained by Archbishop Hinkson, Mr. King made the necessary concession to become a member congregation. “We demoted Coltrane from being God,” he put it. “But the agreement was that he could come into sainthood and be the patron of our church.” As such, the St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane Church has operated for a quarter-century. Mr. King’s wife and several of their children participate in the services as “ministers of sound” and have played at several European jazz festivals. The visitors over the years have included Coltrane’s widow, Alice Coltrane, and the jazz-influenced rock guitarist Carlos Santana. The church combines its unique hagiography and soundtrack with staples of black Christianity, from personal “witnessing” to various forms of social action. In its previous location, the congregation ran a vegetarian soup kitchen; its current place, which lacks a full kitchen, distributes clothing and nonperishable foods. Mr. King’s daughter, Wanika King-Stephens, is the host of a weekly radio show of Coltrane music, “Uplift,” on a local station, KPOO-FM. Francis Davis, an author who attended the church while researching a coming Coltrane biography, “Sheets of Sound,” said, “I kind of went there expecting, I don’t know, snake handlers or something crazy.” Mr. Davis continued: “But it wasn’t like that at all. These are good people They’re doing what churches do. Which is feed the hungry, minister to people’s emotional and spiritual needs. And if you’re looking for free-jazz solos on a Sunday morning, this is the place.”

Yes! I got this back in June.

We're getting an icy mix on Sunday.

Predicting a low of 23F tonight.

Apparently he's alive and well. My apologies for the misinformation, I was only the messenger.

I saw my first snow of the season two weeks ago here in NJ. It wasn't sticking on the ground, but I saw it on cars. Most of the leaves are gone from the trees. Low of 28F last night. I'm fucking thrilled.

Now this Rothko, it needs a bit maintenance around the edges so it tiles seamlessly, it works for now...

I'm not kidding about the fiber Brownie. It works. You think I'm joking? I'm not. Try it. You'll like it.

Highly sensitive constipation issues? The fiber helps a lot.

I recommend fiber. And lot's of it. You never make mistakes?

Change the size of your screen!

November 30, 2007 Evel Knievel, Daredevil, Dies at 69 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 4:52 p.m. ET CLEARWATER, Fla. (AP) -- Evel Knievel, the red-white-and-blue-spangled motorcycle daredevil whose jumps over Greyhound buses, live sharks and Idaho's Snake River Canyon made him an international icon in the 1970s, died Friday. He was 69. Knievel's death was confirmed by his granddaughter, Krysten Knievel. He had been in failing health for years, suffering from diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable condition that scarred his lungs. Knievel had undergone a liver transplant in 1999 after nearly dying of hepatitis C, likely contracted through a blood transfusion after one of his bone-shattering spills. Immortalized in the Washington's Smithsonian Institution as ''America's Legendary Daredevil,'' Knievel was best known for a failed 1974 attempt to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle and a spectacular crash at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. He suffered nearly 40 broken bones before he retired in 1980. Though Knievel dropped off the pop culture radar in the '80s, the image of the high-flying motorcyclist clad in patriotic, star-studded colors was never erased from public consciousness. He always had fans and enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in recent years. His death came just two days after it was announced that he and rapper Kanye West had settled a federal lawsuit over the use of Knievel's trademarked image in a popular West music video. Knievel made a good living selling his autographs and endorsing products. Thousands came to Butte, Mont., every year as his legend was celebrated during the ''Evel Knievel Days'' festival. ''They started out watching me bust my ass, and I became part of their lives,'' Knievel said. ''People wanted to associate with a winner, not a loser. They wanted to associate with someone who kept trying to be a winner.'' For the tall, thin daredevil, the limelight was always comfortable, the gab glib. To Knievel, there always were mountains to climb, feats to conquer. ''No king or prince has lived a better life,'' he said in a May 2006 interview with The Associated Press. ''You're looking at a guy who's really done it all. And there are things I wish I had done better, not only for me but for the ones I loved.'' He had a knack for outrageous yarns: ''Made $60 million, spent 61. ...Lost $250,000 at blackjack once. ... Had $3 million in the bank, though.'' He began his daredevil career in 1965 when he formed a troupe called Evel Knievel's Motorcycle Daredevils, a touring show in which he performed stunts such as riding through fire walls, jumping over live rattlesnakes and mountain lions and being towed at 200 mph behind dragster race cars. In 1966 he began touring alone, barnstorming the West and doing everything from driving the trucks, erecting the ramps and promoting the shows. In the beginning he charged $500 for a jump over two cars parked between ramps. He steadily increased the length of the jumps until, on New Year's Day 1968, he was nearly killed when he jumped 151 feet across the fountains in front of Caesar's Palace. He cleared the fountains but the crash landing put him in the hospital in a coma for a month. His son, Robbie, successfully completed the same jump in April 1989. In the years after the Caesar's crash, the fee for Evel's performances increased to $1 million for his jump over 13 buses at Wembley Stadium in London -- the crash landing broke his pelvis -- to more than $6 million for the Sept. 8, 1974, attempt to clear the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in a rocket-powered ''Skycycle.'' The money came from ticket sales, paid sponsors and ABC's ''Wide World of Sports.'' The parachute malfunctioned and deployed after takeoff. Strong winds blew the cycle into the canyon, landing him close to the swirling river below. On Oct. 25, 1975, he jumped 14 Greyhound buses at Kings Island in Ohio. Knievel decided to retire after a jump in the winter of 1976 in which he was again seriously injured. He suffered a concussion and broke both arms in an attempt to jump a tank full of live sharks in the Chicago Amphitheater. He continued to do smaller exhibitions around the country with his son, Robbie. Many of his records have been broken by daredevil motorcyclist Bubba Blackwell. Knievel also dabbled in movies and TV, starring as himself in ''Viva Knievel'' and with Lindsay Wagner in an episode of the 1980s TV series ''Bionic Woman.'' George Hamilton and Sam Elliott each played Knievel in movies about his life. Evel Knievel toys accounted for more than $300 million in sales for Ideal and other companies in the 1970s and '80s. Born Robert Craig Knievel in the copper mining town of Butte on Oct. 17, 1938, Knievel was raised by his grandparents. He traced his career choice back to the time he saw Joey Chitwood's Auto Daredevil Show at age 8. Outstanding in track and field, ski jumping and ice hockey at Butte High School, he went on to win the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association Class A Men's ski jumping championship in 1957 and played with the Charlotte Clippers of the Eastern Hockey League in 1959. He also formed the Butte Bombers semiprofessional hockey team, acting as owner, manager, coach and player. Knievel also worked in the Montana copper mines, served in the Army, ran his own hunting guide service, sold insurance and ran Honda motorcycle dealerships. As a motorcycle dealer, he drummed up business by offering $100 off the price of a motorcycle to customers who could beat him at arm wrestling. At various times and in different interviews, Knievel claimed to have been a swindler, a card thief, a safe cracker, a holdup man. Evel Knievel married hometown girlfriend, Linda Joan Bork, in 1959. They separated in the early 1990s. They had four children, Kelly, Robbie, Tracey and Alicia. Robbie Knievel followed in his father's footsteps as a daredevil, jumping a moving locomotive in a 200-foot, ramp-to-ramp motorcycle stunt on live television in 2000. He also jumped a 200-foot-wide chasm of the Grand Canyon. Knievel lived with his longtime partner, Krystal Kennedy-Knievel, splitting his time between their Clearwater condo and Butte. They married in 1999 and divorced a few years later but remained together. Knievel had 10 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

What I remember is wine altering the sound of the music. But....hey...that's just me.

This is entirely possible, like I wrote, this was 2nd hand (or more, even) information.