Big Wheel

A quality control question: I'm listening to the Golson/Farmer on Spotify right now and there is some kind of digital artifact that has ruined some of the tracks. Specifically, the sound I'm talking about starts at around 3:00 of "Little Karin" and continues all the way through the end of the set. (Anyone else with Spotify hear this, or do just I need to restart something?) Does anyone with the eMusic versions hear what I'm talking about, as well?

Sorry, but that's BS. Breaking contracts by both sides is a standard part of the business of football. NFL contracts are non-guaranteed and the management releases players early all the time while exercising various parts of the contract that allow them to not have to pay the full value of the deal. If an NFL contract were considered an unbreakable commitment, you'd see constant litigation to resolve issues with the terms not being followed to the letter. If the teams don't care enough to sue players, I don't see why I should consider a player who uses leverage with his contract to be breaking some code of honor. Business is business.

It's not exactly a surprise that the wealthiest cities in the country charge higher nominal prices for tickets. Much more interesting is to see stats that show the ratio of ticket prices to broader economic measures (the one analysis I've seen on this looked at cost of living and unemployment rate). Those stats show what I've long suspected: Miami sports teams are the ones truly taking advantage of their fan base, even raising ticket prices in the middle of what was a very deep local recession.

I think Jim's perspective isn't that "labor" per se is to be resented here, but rather the market itself - that regardless of what prices dictate it's simply unseemly to have this kind of situation come about. I sympathize with this framing a little bit (I hate the fact that concert tickets to any big name are usually $100+, even though it's because people are willing to pay through the nose to see these bands), but don't see any feasible way out of it that doesn't make things worse (richer gazillionaire owners and so forth). Obviously it's also easier to notice when the "labor" is very prominent/concentrated like in sports. Whereas nobody makes a big deal, of course, when Company A sells a new giant widget-making machine to Company B for $100 million and most of the profit from the transaction goes to some hedge fund bigwig who invested in Company A. (Instead of, say, paying Company A's workers more or making widgets much cheaper for consumers to buy.)

Care to share some examples? People believe different things. Saying when you think someone's opinion is ill-considered or ridiculous doesn't make you "intolerant." Sorry if you feel like this is a personal slam - it isn't, believe me, it's just that the whole trope of claiming "the mere fact that I have different opinions means they must be defensible, and your making fun of my ideas shows that you're intolerant" is really tiresome at this point and is the most common BS line used by the board's resident political reactionary to justify all kinds of garbage. If anything, the intolerance is stronger on the part of the one claiming others are being intolerant: there are implicit claims in this whole line of thinking that 1) their ideas should not be subject to critical scrutiny, 2) decrying "disunity" basically amounts to saying "I'm right and you should uncritically embrace my correct position because not doing so means we aren't unified." Not a very generous attitude if you ask me. Perhaps a thicker skin is in order?

Not really. If there were really a net shift to light beers what you'd see is that light beer sales would be increasing. Instead they're merely not decreasing. Some people may be switching from crap regular beer to crap light beer, but if that's the case roughly as many are also switching from crap light beer to imports/craft beer.

Old Milwaukee is the flagship of the high-end products made by faltering Pabst Brewing Company I like PBR as much as the next hipster, but if Old Milwaukee is at the high end, please don't tell me what Pabst's low-end products are. The article itself explains why this is happening: the beers are just as shitty as they've always been, but America is finally waking up to craft beer. Decent, widely available American beer - one more thing America should thank Jimmy Carter for!

Pulled from Youtube, otherwise I'd embed: http://videos.nymag.com/video/Sandra-Lee-Swears-and-Gropes-He#c=RY609B305F0XP724&t=Sandra Lee Swears and Gropes Herself

along similar lines:

Not a bizarre decision. Just a really, really stupid one.

Listening now to Sign O' The Times for the first time, on Spotify. Is it just me, or does anyone else hear echoes of Zappa on this record? The sax solos remind me quite a bit of Brecker's on Zappa in New York (I know, I know, it could just be that everyone was obsessed with Brecker during this period). And there are chunks here and there of advanced mallet playing that make me think of the 70s band with Ruth Underwood.

Has anyone posted about the recent Rollins birthday concert where Ornette showed up to play with him? The show was still streaming via NPR as of this weekend. Ah, just saw Mark Stryker had posted something recently. Here's the link: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/28/139978299/first-listen-sonny-rollins-road-shows-vol-2?device=iphone

I don't agree with either of those interpretations: neither 1) "It's because I didn't get my meds that I did a terrible thing," or 2) "In prison, because I have no meds, I want to molest children." Right. Remember, the message is being written by someone who presumably does not know that we have been scouring the Web for information on Operation Delego. Her audience is people who are asking "Uh, WTF happened to Bill, who hasn't been seen in months? Is he OK?" Not people who already know Bill is incarcerated and are wondering how on Earth something like this could have happened.

Wha? Why would it affect vocal music differently? I must have missed Andy Bey's album Andy Bey Sings "In the Navy" 8 Different Ways In Leather Assless Chaps.

It's because DHS is charged with fighting cybercrime and so forth; it falls under the domain of ICE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement#Cyber_Crimes . That coupled with the international nature of the ring probably led to their being involved.

Yes. In fact a Google search turns up at least 4 or 5 sex offenders with that name. Again, there are over 700000 sex offenders in this country. The authorities must run into cases where there are multiple offenders with the same name all the time. Do you have any reason for believing that there is a general failure in police procedures around this, leading to massive numbers of false arrests, or a specific failure in police procedures in this case?

Could you please explain to me the difference between the two or post some photos? Thanks! Oh - Leeway read my mind! You're lucky I'm not talking about what else I found You're right, not a very good pic. Hard to find even pics of ripe dew! This is a bit better I think: The problem is that wholesalers and supermarkets ship long before they are ripe. The only solution is to let them sit on the counter for a few days until you get some give when pushing the ends. Don't know why, but if you put them (or any fruit like peaches, nectarines, etc) in a paper bag (not plastic) it will accelerate the ripening process. Works pretty well. It's because the melon emits ethylene gas as it ripens, and the gas in turn further causes ripening. Put the melon in a paper bag and the gas is trapped in the bag, causing it to get more and more concentrated. This really works like a charm with pears. A farmer once told me that he thinks some melons will actually ripen further in the refrigerator even after you cut them. Makes a certain amount of sense because many melons like colder weather anyway. Have only had mixed results with this method, mainly because I am not patient enough to conduct a true experiment once I have cut a melon open...

A good friend's elderly parents live about 50 miles east of there. Any word on how the Hudson Valley fared?

Perhaps you could share the sites you have sleuthed and your reasoning that this is a case of mistaken identity? Unless the news reports are getting it very badly wrong, the Bill Barton we know was the one arrested in Washington, he was a registered offender, his alleged screen name is the same as the Youtube screen name of someone who likes some pretty niche jazz, and his disappearance matches the time of his arrest. And Chuck has apparently found his mugshot, so it doesn't seem likely that the "mistaken identity" could be on the part of anyone but the authorities. Given that there are over 700,000 registered sex offenders in the US I would think that "let's double-check and make sure we're arresting the right offender by this name" would be rather standard procedure for law enforcement. Is there some reason you have to doubt this beyond "it can't possibly be the Bill Barton we know because he was such a nice guy"?

So admittedly it has been a long time since I discussed this with my old teacher, but what sets Bishop apart is pretty inside baseball and unlikely to be noticed by the casual listener. The gist of it is that Bishop was one of the earliest pianists to routinely use quartal voicings in the left hand, BUT unlike McCoy, never really adopted them within the context of a modal approach (side-slipping, pentatonic patterns in the right hand, etc.) Instead Bishop stuck more or less with Bud's melodic and harmonic vocabulary. By this I basically mean that the right hand does the bebop thing and the music is still revolving around ii-V-Is. The result sounds a little bit brittle - because they often lack a 7th or 3rd, the left-hand voicings "pull" the listener less from chord to chord compared to the Wynton Kelly/Bill Evans left-hand voicings (like the ubiquitous 3rd/13th/b7th/9th you'll see all the time on dominant chords). But there's a tension here because the underlying harmony and the melodic lines (again, coming more-or-less straight from bop) actually do have lots of this tendency. If you're expecting Bishop to sound like Monk or Andrew Hill or Herbie Nichols, you're going to be disappointed. Monk's music sounds different because the harmony itself is different - you have all kinds of crazy altered extensions (let's not even get into the ways Monk was a genius at controlling the dynamics of each note in a chord the way he wanted). Herbie Nichols sounds different for the same fundamental reason - there's a very twisted approach to harmony and rhythm even though you're dealing mostly with simpler chords than Monk used. Bishop isn't like that; the differences are much more subtle because his overall approach fits sort of in the middle of the continuum that Bud started and Herbie/McCoy really fleshed out (and everyone else copied).

IMO it is better than Twitter and Facebook. The privacy controls are much more intuitive than Facebook's, and they are more flexible than Twitter's. And the longer form is a clear plus over Twitter. And the ancillary features (Hangouts primarily) beat the pants off anything the others have to offer. The problem is the network effect. Facebook's user base is just too huge and the appeal of any new social network is greatly diminished unless half your friends have already realized how much better it is. That hasn't really happened yet, so Google+ still feels insular and quiet.

No pets in the house (it's a miracle I can feed myself) but I am a fan of cats that think they are dogs. Here's my buddy Owen, extremely friendly resident cat of Aardvark Books: Here's Owen in some other dude's lap: And here he is in my lap:

The other shoe dropped yesterday: virtually every record on Tzadik is gone from Spotify. Pretty disappointed. With all the Tzadik stuff I was getting into thanks to Spotify, I really wanted to reward Zorn with some purchases. Much harder to explore now.

The ending to Bamboozled almost left me in tears. A very flawed movie, and having seen Reality Bites last year it's obviously derivative in some ways of that film, yet...it somehow works at what I think Lee was trying to accomplish. I think to attack Lee for flat characters is to miss the point a bit. Many of these characters are intentionally flat, like in a Greek tragedy.

We actually just felt a 3.6 that was centered just south of Oakland. I thought it was my downstairs neighbor stomping around his apartment.