JSngry

Truth be told, all things considered, etc. maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but before this year, the last time I followed baseball on a full season basis was through the 90s, and the two biggest "shocks to my system" have been the increased number of broken bats and the amount of inexplicably bad umpiring calls, both on the bases and for the strike zones as well. Don't remember if I brought it up during the season, but there was a Rangers/Mets game (played here on a Sunday) whre Nelson Cruz (iirc) was called out on a Strike 3 that was actually Strike 2. And nobody caught it! The broadcasters were like, "uhhhh...." but that was it until after the game. I was pissed at Wash & Co, for not having somebody catch it, but really, HTF does a MLB umpiring crew let something as basic as the ball-strike count get away from them? And some of these strike zones...I knew last night it was crazyass, but these days you got the graphs you can go to almost as soon as the game is over to confirm your suspicions. If there's any consolation in this one from last night, it's that it was more or less equally bad, but there's too many blatant misses here to be consoled by that...

Great cover. Never seen that before. There was a series of four, actually.

Not as much of a drag as losing Elvin! But Roy certainly more than adequately filled the vacancy. You think about evreything that was going on with that music in that world at that time, and for anybody to play Elvin's gig like Roy did...that's a pretty awe-inspiring, heroic act afaic.

I think he was already doing it...didn't he play on a lot of the Sesame Street music? I figure a lot of guys picked up electric in the late 60s in order to cover/get studio gigs. Hell, even Ron Carter did!

Yeah, it was a compendium of recordings of Haynes subbing for Elvin.

Erect trumpet bell end!

Headphones!

Pseudo-Asian font!

All I can say is that the only apple product I've used has been a iPod, and I love the intuitiveness of it, not so much the inconsistencies with the OS, but oh well about that. Still not a smartphone guy (or a cell phone guy for that matter), but the lates phone that LTB got was an iPhone-ish device. Pretty cool, although virtual keyboards and my thumbs seem to be congenital enemies. Have always used PCs due to always having to be compatible at home with work & school & etc. Am sure that Macs are superior, but not necessarily in any way that matters to me. So Jobs might not have changed my world specifically, but the output from his general techno-birth-canal sure has (for better or worse, I don't know...still not crazy about seeing people at ballgames sitting behind home plate texting all damn game instead of watching the game itself, same thing with players on gigs checking their phones every time the have, like, an 8 measure break) but I like the notion of the guy anyway. Not sharing in the hero-worship (or whatever it is myself), but still would rather have somebody with at least some sense of grace riding herd over the hacks and nerds, which is what he seemed to bring to the table. Still...the Xerox Palo Alto scene...everybody should look at that if you want to see hardcore innovation. Developmental, not so much, Xerox could not have been any more moredumb than they were on that, but if Apple was the birth canal, that place was the actual womb. But this sour grapes "lucky", "right place right time" meme...no. Whoever it was that said luck is when preparation meets opportunity had it right.

How's this for a crazyass strike zone?

Agreed. I was thinking that it might have been a set of short twinkly-dink kissie-poos, but now, three's plenty of real playing going on here. Yet more proof, that the late-60s-early 740s were indeed a second "golden age" for the big band format.

Gonzalez has proven to be the guy who does like he dis this evening, stuff starts getting too wet and slippery, everybody's wobbly and unbalanced, Gonzalez goes in for a batter or two, and BAM everything's back to normal. Mike Gonzalez is the smack in the kisser of the Rangers' bullpen. . You go Mike, slap those bitches back into sense when they go getting all flivvery and stuff Mike Gonzalez, y'all, a Texas boy his own self!

Lace on the head!

After a century without as much as a drop, couldn't the rain have waited for another two days?

Faces of color-specific Moses

Streetwalker Harry Walker Leroy Vinegar

Candy Finch The Robins Robber Barons

The mention of Jimmy Owens on the Billy Taylor Bell LP that Dan posted about elsewhere suddenly jogged this memory: Bil.ly's on it. Not a life-changing affair by any means, but if you're a total completist...

Curtains in the background!

Jack Sheldon was in Mort Lindsey's band for the Merv Griffin show. We didn't get the David Frost show where I lived. Pre-cable America was a bitch sometimes.

The three easels in front look like three crosses, so...

Or, if you want to reference the post of the cover as well as the cover itself:

I'm curious how the Taylor LP is...Taylor got a lot of props back in the day for having the "hippest" talk show band, but in retrospect, I don't know but that that wasn't just a lot of hype...but maybe not....also, not sure exactly when it came out but I think it might have been when Bell was in the process of transitioning to Arista, or maybe a year or two before, when they had The 5th Dimension and what was left of The Monkees...didn't Barry Manilow's first actually cover the name-change, first on Bell then on Arista?... the Bell logo on the cover is definitely after the Box Tops era... Just wondering how "commercial" an LP it ends up being.