Big Wheel

Roughly, a balmy -30 degrees Celsius, though maybe a bit warmer (~0 Celsius) if the Spirit rover's data is any indication. If there's any life there, it either lives deep in a crater where pressure is higher, or else has evolved to cope with water going straight from ice to a gas without passing through the liquid phase. Water on Mars acts like dry ice on Earth.

In my admittedly limited experience, most professional academic creative writers (especially poets) tend to be a little insane. You get characters in all the arts, but it's with poetry and theater that the eccentricity is often dialed up to 11.

It's worthwhile to do lots of googling for codes. One trick that many people don't realize is that many credit cards, stores (like Costco), associations, etc. have standing discount codes with the rental car companies and the companies very rarely bother to check to confirm that you are indeed, say, a Costco member who is "supposed" to have the code. I worked behind the desk at Avis for a summer...whenever we had a particularly stubborn customer, we'd give them the biggest discount code (Sam's Club) regardless of whether they were a Sam's Club member. If you are really desperate I'll share another trick that helped me in a pinch. It's a pain in the ass but it's worth a try if nothing else has worked.

Of course they will check this forum, as they will inspect the Facebook accounts of all his "friends" there. I'm kind of curious whether Jim was subpoenaed for access to the board's messaging system, to be honest. But the more we learn about this case the grosser it feels.

Pales in comparison to the alleged crime in terms of how queasy it makes me, but what are the chances that the FBI read its fair share of this forum? I'd guess fairly high. *waves to the federal agents*

Late addendum: the Carmen Mcrae date that Mike posted, Woman Talk, appears by all indications to not be a Vanguard session - it's billed as being recorded at the Village Gate and the Half Note. I'm deleting it from my list unless someone has evidence to the contrary...

I just got a Spotify invite this week and have been eagerly combing through Spotify and adding a ton of stuff I haven't picked up in CD form yet. Here's how I grade out how each label's handled their deals with Spotify: Blue Note/EMI: A-. There is really a ton of Blue Note stuff available and some of it has been OOP for a few years, like the George Braith sessions. Not everything though - I couldn't find the 10" Conoisseur series or West Coast Classics, for example. And surprise surprise, the Beatles are conspicuously absent from Spotify. Verve/Impulse:B-. Decent selection, but loses lots of points for failing to make available longer tracks. This is particularly bad on albums with lots of longer cuts - the Joe Henderson/Wynton Kelly records are particularly dismal. Would have given a C except the entire Ahmad Jamal Mosaic (sans one track) is available. Atlantic/Rhino: A+, mainly for including complete box sets up there. Some are OOP like the Ornette Atlantic box. Sony/Columbia: A. Having the whole Miles Cellar Door box: epic win. A little sad that I couldn't find the Plugged Nickel box. Black Saint/Soul Note: so far, A. Great selection and complete albums. OJC/Concord: D. Bad selection and it looks like any track over 7 minutes long might be unavailable. ECM: B-. Couldn't find a single complete album, iffy selection. Smaller labels that look like an intriguing amount of stuff has been made available: Xanadu Red Enja Tzadik Criss Cross Sharp Nine Double-Time

Is the resistance from Cambridge simply that heaven forbid students have another place on Mass Ave. where they might congregate to eat a sandwich, potentially at hours when the fine working folk of Porter Square are nestled in their beds? (Always dug hanging out at Stereo Jack's and would be sad to see it go, but town-gown politics are truly absurd. Can't think of another reason why various parties would be freaked out at the expansion of a pizza place on a major thoroughfare.)

Didn't mean that Les Six and so forth were directly heard by most of Europe. More that they played an outsize role in influencing elite opinions on what constituted "jazz," which then trickled down to everyone else, further muddling everything. I could be convinced otherwise on this though.

Probably both of these, everything in between, and also a bunch of stuff completely off our map as "jazz." In addition to this, the "jazz fever" that gripped Europe in the 1920s was also partly driven by European classical composers' distillations of African-American music of all types. My understanding is that to a lot of people at the time, the stuff composed by the likes of Satie and Milhaud during this period wasn't just jazz influenced, but itself was jazz. (Side note: a musicologist friend studying 20th century German opera recently played Boris Blacher's 1953 piece "Abstrakte Oper Nr. 1" for me because she couldn't understand why all the musicological literature on it goes on and on about all the jazz influence in it. I listened to it - it's basically a typical atonal 20th century classical piece, except it has an occasional klezmer-ish clarinet solo and emphasizes the brass section somewhat. So these kinds of goofy misunderstandings are by no means limited to 1920s Europeans. )

There isn't one - the priest who is railing against jazz is placing it alongside alcohol and landlordism as one of the great threats to the fledgling Irish nation. If you're a figure in the 1930s Irish far right, you can pick and choose any of these to get conservative-leaning people riled up. Making sense of it beyond that - well, since when has any far-right political movement had an internal logic that stood up to much scrutiny? BTW, I'm not trying to make any larger political point in starting this thread - just thought it was an interesting anecdote worth sharing. FWIW, and the link in the first post hints at this, the "jazz" that was the subject of so much ire was almost certainly a very different beast than the music of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong (though Fr. Conefrey would have undoubtedly have disapproved of them too).

In this case there is a lot more context needed to really understand what landlordism was in the Irish sense, and how anti-landlordism was bound up with nationalism. http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/Landlordism Pretty much all ultranationalist rightwing movements in Europe had this kind of appeal as an animating force- the root idea of national self-determination is legitimate and even focused on justice for the powerless, like with anti-landlordism, even if things quickly go off the rails from there. Interesting how the American variety never seemed much concerned with the real justice bit in the first place...

http://www.theirishstory.com/2011/07/01/the-anti-jazz-campaign/

Even though I rarely buy mp3s, I don't think it's really all that necessary to start a separate thread. This thread may have "box bargains" in the title but the meaning in context is pretty clearly "Where can I get lots of music in quantity for cheap?" I mean, I don't buy crappily-packaged European-made budget boxes, full stop, but I'm not demanding that we start a separate thread for them to cater to my personal packaging preferences.

Agreed! It took about 3 hours to upload my 20 GB to the Amazon Cloud. I let Amazon select the music just to see what it would do. Now I am going through and deleting what I don't want on the Cloud, or the stuff that it took from my hard drive and for which it had no indexing information. (I have digitized a lot of my lp and 45 collection over the years, then when I put some of that stuff on iTunes I took pains to index it all very carefully. But AC took not only iTune, indexed songs but also "unindexed" songs from folders other than iTunes. Now it's a pain to sort and I don't see any way to edit song titles, etc.) I would call this a product in Beta. Do you have a cable connection? On my crappy AT&T DSL, uploading 75 GB took about 2 weeks. The Google software is cool but definitely not without its flaws - there are some annoying bugs involving how it counts the songs you've uploaded, so I had to disable the uploader after finishing uploading everything because it still thinks upload isn't done (even though it is). I am wondering how robust all these services at handling the following cases: a) songs whose tags you edit after upload - if I realize that there's a misspelling or whatever and I fix the tags in iTunes, will Google/Amazon recognize the fix and sync it? Or do I have to do everything twice manually? b) songs I want to re-rip because the first rip is bad. I have a few albums with audible distortion caused by bad rips (probably caused by dust or whatever on the CD), and eventually plan to try ripping them again. If I have already uploaded them to Google/Amazon and re-rip, will the new copy get uploaded, or will Google/Amazon think that since the filenames are the same it doesn't need to upload a new copy?

Interesting, I did not realize before that my 3 individual "complete" CDs only contain the master takes. If you don't care about the alternates and whatnot, the individual CDs can be had for $4-6 new at many online stores. (J&R has them for $3.99 each though volume 3 is out of stock.)

How old is your daughter? That is, is she at the age where her interest in piano is likely to be a passing phase or does it look like she's going to stay interested in the instrument for years? The Youtube clips of the p95 look pretty solid, but if you think she's going to be at all serious about it (especially if she is more interested in classical music) I would try to make a small upright piano work, because she's eventually going to need one anyway. It'll be hard to get through the door, but once it's in place it won't take up all that much bigger a footprint than a digital instrument and there are gadgets you can buy to mitigate some of the humidity issues. The one big advantage of a digital instrument (besides the obvious, greater portability) is versatility. Virtually all keyboards these days can be used as MIDI controllers, which allows you to do all kinds of stuff with them if you hook them up to a PC.

It's all virtually the same stuff as they always discount. If you bought everything you wanted in previous hathut sales here you don't even need to bother looking, because there won't be anything new to pique your interest. We should consolidate all the threads about this and just add "SALE ON" to the consolidated thread whenever they do the discounting...

Exactly. Jurek's reviews only make sense once you start with the principle that he knows nothing about music and is constantly trying to cover for that fact by spewing BS in the manner of a college freshman.

The lack of a patch cord (to say nothing of an orchestra) is a bit of a tipoff. Wireless amplification was not exactly common back then...

Google Music Beta is free and you get about 150 GB of storage. I'm currently at about 70% uploaded of a 75 GB or so collection. (invitation required at the moment) What I hope is that one day someone codes an app allowing cloud-to-cloud file transfer. That way you can have really robust backup that allows you to quickly copy stuff from one cloud service to another.

this one? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_mcgrath Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

That would make the most sense of all but it's never going to happen. No way the NCAA and individual universities would ever give up this cash cow at this point.

I would be OK with that, though let's face it, the amount an orchestra makes the university is effectively zero compared with the average D I-A football program. Most college football players may be dickish meatheads but they are still effectively getting exploited by a system that makes millions of dollars off them for universities while requiring them to risk injury for no pay. Your average university endowment fund manager makes in the high six to seven figures for the money he brings to the university by being a spreadsheet jockey all day and making smart investments. College athletes are also the source of huge amounts of revenue and yet make nothing. But to me the most realistic way to handle this isn't to pay student-athletes - it's to stop making them be students. Let them take a class or two if they want for free just like employees can at many universities.

http://www.michaelei...rg/blog/?p=358# Very interesting! Thanks BW! Granted, this is only what Marketplace sellers use. Amazon's own algorithm is almost certainly much "smarter" even if it does still occasionally lead to big price swings. Does anyone want to try a little experiment with the "Tell us about a lower price" button? If so PM me.