T.D.

Just finished. Knew little about the author (though I vividly recall his 1982 hit single/video), but thought the book looked interesting. Definitely an enjoyable read.

It also didn't help to misspell "Jarret" in the second word of the article!

A Pegasus Airlines Boeing 737 passenger plane is seen stuck in mud on an embankment, a day after skidding off the airstrip at Trabzon's [Turkey] airport on the Black Sea coast on Jan. 14. Photographer: AFP via Getty Images http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42680238

I've been on a Sun Ra kick and decided to embark on this "research project" box...

I also thought it would sell slowly. I held off purchase for a long time for that reason, and because the discography didn't overly impress. Finally bought it last October when Mosaic had a free shipping offer (iirc). The first couple of hearings, I wasn't knocked out, but I did some intensive listening recently and have come to really enjoy the set. Brackeen and Sanders sessions were the most pleasant surprises. Recorded sound of the piano on discs 1-2 is bad, but I got over it.

Two Sun Ra solo piano discs; Pharoah Sanders, Izipho Zam (from the Clifford Jordan Strata-East Mosaic)

The Glass Bead Games, In the World and Cecil Payne sessions.

I stopped drinking very nearly 20 years ago, but all the brands mentioned seem like crap to me. Long live the craft brewers! The article makes some interesting implications re. oligopoly in the beer business. Anheuser-Busch InBev SA (a Brazilian/Belgian company) makes 6 of the 10 brands (decline rankers 1,4,5,6,7,8). Molson/Coors (a Canadian/American company) makes the other 4 (rankers 2,3,9,10). But the article points out that "...Still, Anheuser-Busch has remained a strong performer on Wall Street. Over the same five years, even as domestic Budweiser sales fell by 3.8 million barrels, the company’s share price climbed from $55 to over $100 per share -- out performing both the Dow and S&P 500 indices." I looked on the Morningstar site, and Molson/Coors has underperformed the S&P 500 over the past 5 years, but not by much. Morningstar actually indicates that AB has very slightly underperformed the S&P 500 over the past 5 years, but has outperformed Molson/Coors. Interestingly, both have soundly outperformed the "Beverages- Brewers" index. This seems strange to me, as I'd expect the 2 companies combined to make up a large percentage of said index. I suspect that AB, being a foreign company, is not included in the index. But I'm too lazy to research further right now.

Hard drives can fail. My work computer's hard drive developed some bad spots a while back, and I had to replace it b/c it was causing the computer to crash. I went to the local Best Buy and the rep was touting expensive solid state hard drives. My tech guy advised me not to spend the extra money because solid state drives fail hard and there is no possible data recovery whatsoever. Dunno whether he was correct, but I followed his advice.

+1. Thanks, Mark. I hadn't heard of Mr. Mann's passing.

This is the first Alice Coltrane recording I heard, after paying no attention for a long time (maybe I didn't take her seriously, or thought her music would be too much woo-woo spirituality). It's outstanding! I've since gotten quite a few AC recordings (including "spiritual" material ).

Probably, except for the Johnny Carson mentions. Growing up in the Midwest, Jimmy Hoffa was the mysterious disappearance of choice, supplanting D. B. Cooper.

I posted about DeepMind /AlphaZero back on Dec. 6 (in the chess thread), but nobody noticed. Seriously, I think the implications are incredible and far-reaching. In jazz, if the goal is to "swing", "play like Monk" or the like, I expect AlphaZero could quickly learn to do it, provided the programmers were motivated to embark on such a project.

Well, lots of people live there now, just not in the way you mean... Ebbets Field Apartments in Crown Heights, overlaid with a drawing to scale of Ebbets Field as it was. Not to be trite, but things change/evolve/devolve/whatever, regardless of how much I bitch about it.

First book in a series by an author my brother recommended. So far (about halfway through) an excellent British spy novel. I was less impressed by the earlier Herron novel (Down Cemetery Road) I read, though.

Continuing to explore early Ra albums...great stuff, dunno why I ignored him until now. My favorite Brignola recording, with a real all-star group.

Lots of child prodigies in this age of computerized training. Here's a 2-year-old classical pianist Here's a young (OK, he's 20) Russian chess grandmaster playing classical piano pieces from memory while simultaneously playing 3 blindfold chess games: Scroll down to the Daniil Yuffa video; performance starts at 4:30

Topic of little/no interest, but I just saw something funny which will be my final post on the subject: The site linked to below runs daily tactical puzzles, which increase in difficulty from Monday through Sunday. The underlying games are often given funny names. Today's puzzle features a very clever pun.