Big Wheel

I wonder if your local DNS server might be having problems. You might try clicking the following links and then pasting them directly into your browser address bar. If there is a noticeable performance difference, you might want to change the DNS server being used. http://68.71.208.25/ http://espn.go.com/

It could be any number of things. It's possible that it's simply that your computer is getting slower. Windows accumulates a lot of crap that slows machines to a crawl after a couple of years. But Facebook and Twitter could be culprits as well because they are constantly using bandwidth to get new updates and so forth - that could be slowing down your connection. I would at a minimum clear IE's cache and cookies, or switch browsers entirely to see if that speeds things up. If you are using a laptop, you should also make sure that the laptop isn't having any power/temperature problems. My laptop was performing atrociously until I finally installed a temperature monitor and realized that tons of accumulated dust inside the machine was causing it to overheat and automatically slow down to protect itself.

Haven't these things been made for years? I'm pretty sure I've seen companies sell soda mixes as a complement to their seltzer makers, though maybe nobody's been slick enough to market them all together as a single concept. The main flaw if I had to guess is that the mixes usually taste like crap. Or at least not enough like name brand flavors for people to want to drink them. Plus homemade soda isn't portable like a can is so you can't bring it to work/fishing/bbqs etc.

It's just the glass (I have the same Duvel tulip). Trois Pistoles is a Belgian-style strong dark ale made by Unibroue in Canada. I've been cellaring a bottle of it for about 3 years now!

Are they allowing new signups or is this only available to current members? I let my subscription lapse in 2006.

Let's put it this way: it's reasonable for an Amazon customer to expect that 70% of the reviews for Led Zeppelin III are going to be from diehard Led Zeppelin fans. It's reasonable for them to expect that 70% of the reviews of All Music are going to be from diehard Warne Marsh fans. It's not reasonable to figure that they're going to expect that 70% are from Organissimo forum members who happen to interact with Chuck all the time. Obviously there are lots of shades of gray here, but this does make a difference in credibility IMO.

No, but IMO it's ethical to disclose your personal friendship with Chuck when doing so. Not exactly because I think there would be a conflict of interest, but because reviewers owe it to readers to provide some information about who is doing the reviewing. A cousin of mine wrote a bestselling novel and I read it and thought it was great. I gave it 4 stars out of 5 on goodreads.com and wrote a nice review, and also disclosed that the author was a family member. What if all 30 Goodreads reviews were from members of my family and none of us had disclosed that fact? It's not like my cousin kicks back percentages of his book sales to me, but anyone who discovered that our family was spamming Goodreads would instantly think that the skewed distribution was fishy and a possible indicator that the book sucks. A lot of this is just about having a basic level of respect for consumers of information on the Internet. People come to Amazon expecting the reviews to be from an organic cross-section of the public. That's why I'll never buy another Terry McAuliffe book again - NOT because he exploits his friendships and his power relationship over his employees to juice his Amazon reviews, but because the juicing shows he has no respect for his readers' ability to sift through information and decide for themselves whether they should buy his book.

Not spam if you use the strict definition of "purely commercial, dishonest and unsolicited garbage communication used to sell more garbage." But if you use a more flexible definition that encompasses stuff like advertising clickspam, such as "using organized means to abuse or take advantage of systems that rely on crowdsourced data," then things start to look rather dicier. When I worked at Giant Megacorporation™ back in the day, there was once a magazine article critical of Giant Megacorporation making the rounds that we all agreed was factually inaccurate and unfair to us. One of my stupider coworkers wanted us to all visit Digg and give this article the thumbs down so it would be "buried" and Digg users would have a harder time seeing it. In my book, that kind of manipulation, however heartfelt and just, is clearly a form of spam. One other point is worth making: -Those of us who think spamming Amazon reviews is a bad idea are also on Chuck's side here. David's original post didn't say "this is categorically evil and wrong", it suggested that we keep this kind of thing to a tasteful minimum because going overboard may well backfire on Chuck. As an independent label, it seems like Nessa probably wants to position itself as the little label that puts out great, impeccably and honestly produced music in contrast to the majors for whom filthy lucre is everything. If that reputation is tarnished, that can have serious repercussions on Chuck's bottom line just as much as any stupid Amazon review can.

Very much agreed. +1. While the bad review sucks and is not particularly fair to Chuck, it would also be bad to see the board turned into a conduit for obvious reviewspam. After reading Terry McAuliffe's hideously written What a Party! I went over to Amazon to see what people thought about it. To my surprise not only were there lots of glowing reviews from McAuliffe's famous buddies like Paul Begala, but there was this one from a guy who looks like a normal reviewer - except that in the book itself, McAuliffe mentions a person by that name who happens to be his own personal driver. Before I realized that, I thought that McAuliffe was just a bad writer - now I think he's a manipulative jerk who encourages his own employees to juice his book sales at the expense of the public.

They will also cost you about $15 in tax if you go into the store in New York. Anyway, the high shipping cost is one more reason I like to wait to see if they drop the price further.

Well, sort of. J&R is selling lots of RVGs for $5.99 right now and it looks like everything in the Mosaic box except for Indeed is offered at that price point. Lots of other good stuff too, although I am holding out to see if they offer all of these under one of their "2 for $10" deals in May.

I would say the legal considerations are minimal, if not non-existent. That's never stopped our aspiring barristers exalted moderators before...

A last minute heads up for android users-the tunein (radiotime) app pro version is free for the next hour or so. I am a big fan of the regular free version which gets tons of radio stations...looks like the pro version allows you to record anything you hear to your phone. Good stuff. In case it wasn't clear, you can get the app from the amazon android app store, not the regular android market.

Uniqlo and BN? Holy crap, it's true: hipsters ARE ruining everything.

You are all very welcome. It shows that it pays to maintain (and regularly check) a wishlist on Amazon. Or you could use the Amazon price tracker at camelcamelcamel.com, which sends you emails or tweets automatically when the price of stuff on your list goes below a certain level. My new favorite site.

Well, this is fun. Some asshole did indeed rip off my SSN and seems to have filed a return with it to defraud the IRS out of a refund. Unexpectedly on this week's agenda: call 1) the IRS ID theft group 2) call the FTC 3) call the SSA 4) call the credit bureaus 5) round up copies of my birth certificate and other important ID documents to file with my return. Goddamn it.

My report was written 3 days before the Union Square store closed, I think. Maybe 4. Selection by that point was already miserable - if you weren't a Matt Wilson completist there was absolutely no music worth buying. The book sections were almost entirely bombed out. I actually recommended that an artist friend check out the cheap fixtures to see if anything was worth salvaging for an art project. They were selling everything except the carpet and the paint off the walls.

In the UK most people are on the "pay as you earn" (PAYE) system. Income tax is deducted from your monthly or weekly pay before you get it and sent to the revenue by the employer. If you're self-employed you have to make an annual tax return. We have that also EXCEPT you ALSO have to make an annual tax return anyway. There's no good reason for such a system. We only have it because a) Turbotax and H&R Block and other tax preparers always lobby hard against this kind of simplification and b) the Republican Party wants to make doing taxes as painful a task as possible for average people because it helps their anti-tax jihad. Nice country we've got here, eh?

I just e-filed in California a minute ago through Turbotax, but am getting an error that my federal return cannot be e-filed because someone else has apparently filed a 1040 already using my SSN. Getting up tomorrow to call the IRS to confirm this. #@$^%$!

Probably, but that's not really what we're talking about. Would Horace Parlan be able to play the Hammerklavier? Almost certainly not. Which is not to say that Parlan sucks. Or that anyone who can play the Hammerklavier and get the notes right is a musical genius. It just means that the style that Parlan plays in doesn't make nearly the same physical demands of him as does Beethoven. That doesn't mean that style sucks. How is this controversial?

In today's daily lesson of Why You Should Never Believe 100% of Anything The British Press Says, the quoted bit (from the Daily Mail originally I think) drops whole sentences that came out of Seinfeld's mouth and thus twists Seinfeld's tone into something he didn't really intend. The original interview (skip to 2:00 for those comments): When you leave the parts in about how the whole dressing up/theater thing is a particularly British phenomenon, Seinfeld comes off as a Yankee who finds British pretensions more absurdly amusing than anything else. When you strip them out as the Daily Mail did, it sounds like he's making a significantly more sarcastic and politically oriented statement.

"...narrowing the capabilities of the piano." Huh? Bebop/bop requires the ability to improvise on the fly as well as provide accompaniment for those who are doing so. By its very nature this sort of playing demands full and complete control of the keyboard. Mentally, but not physically. Even in comparison with playing Cherokee at breakneck speed in B major, an average Beethoven sonata places far more demands on both hands (especially the left). Are we really going to try and claim that comping behind yourself with the left hand maximizes the capability of the instrument as much as a Bach 3-part invention? Uh uh. It takes a lot of physical stamina---on any instrument---to keep up those tempos, execute, etc. It's a discipline and this is why there are relatively few dedicated bebop pianists. There are hardly any chances to play that music in the purest sense. The term 'bebop' itself is bastardized and now means just 'mainstream' to a lot of people---or nothing at all. But it---the true, undiluted thing---is as technically exacting---physically---as music gets. I'm not even touching the mental part. We'll be out of here next Thursday.... Sorry, but no. How much piano have you played? I've played for roughly 20 years now and can hang passably on an average straight-ahead gig. As much as I love what Bud/Haig/Hank Jones/Marmarosa/Monk do, and as much as I'd agree that there are technical demands the music puts on you (especially at that exalted level), it's just ridiculous to claim that the style "maximizes the capabilities" of the instrument. It doesn't, and it's a good thing for me that it doesn't, because I'm sure I'd really sound like shit if it did.

"...narrowing the capabilities of the piano." Huh? Bebop/bop requires the ability to improvise on the fly as well as provide accompaniment for those who are doing so. By its very nature this sort of playing demands full and complete control of the keyboard. Mentally, but not physically. Even in comparison with playing Cherokee at breakneck speed in B major, an average Beethoven sonata places far more demands on both hands (especially the left). Are we really going to try and claim that comping behind yourself with the left hand maximizes the capability of the instrument as much as a Bach 3-part invention? None of this is to denigrate the abilities of Horace Parlan, whose playing I very much enjoy. Nor the great bebop pianists, many of whom had plenty of technique to spare. But to anyone who has spent more than a little time with the instrument it's pretty clear that bebop piano is pretty minimalist compared to other styles.

Please cite a single legal case where the RIAA or any record label sued consumers for legal purchases of gray market/parallel imports goods at mass-market retailers, as opposed to piracy via filesharing. It's not even clear that it's illegal to sell parallel imports of intellectual property goods, let alone buy them. In Costco v. Omega, did Omega go after everyone who bought a European-market Omega watch at an American Costco?

Only if you apply that special filter that makes it impossible for americans to view the link... if you actually buy these things from yurp, I guess you'd be doing the illegal thing. If you buy them from US vendors, I guess they'd cut you some slack since you acted in good belief... in short: no links allowed, no matter how you turn it. Who is this "they" you speak of? What next, are we going to ban all links to breweries in the "What are you drinking right now" thread? Heavens to Betsy, somewhere an Iranian, Afghan, or Kuwaiti might click it and that would be <gasp> ILLEGAL! To say nothing of what the Indonesian authorities think of "Sexiest album covers"....