Big Wheel

Very strange. Hasn't it been at least 7 or 8 years since the set was widely available? If there's a similar case of something being backordered for almost a decade, I can't think of one.

We'll certainly wait and see. I was one of those buyers last summer. I remember someone on eBay selling a mint copy for $130 around the same time and chuckling to myself, well I just scored a brand new one for less. Silly me. This time Amazon claims "Only X left in stock--order soon (more on the way)". Really? How endless is this supply? That usually does seem to be reliable, in my experience. Of course, all these descriptions are marketing language that likely not-so-perfectly maps to specific codes in their supply chain. For instance, the system might be set up to only show the "more on the way" message when a) the stock drops below a certain number of units AND b) their supplier has included that item in its next shipment, but if, say, it's set up to display that even if b) is not the case, then in a minority of cases you'll see "more on the way" even when the item is permanently gone. "Available from these sellers" doesn't seem to mean "we're never getting this back" - I noticed the Lady Day box on Amazon.uk disappeared for about a week in February after about a day showing something like "Temporarily Out of Stock", but then they appear to have gotten more boxes in and one is now on its way to me.

That remark is rather common on many amazon listings. Really? I don't think I've ever seen it for music on Amazon US. But maybe I don't often search for stuff that's likely to be backordered. I tend to think Stefan isn't far off the mark - could these be manufactured on demand?

Doing some searching, I found several threads on other boards that describe something similar happening with the Plugged Nickel box last summer. Amazon was ultimately unable to fill the orders...I wonder if some supplier is doing something shady that causes Amazon to list it as in stock, or if it's just an error of some kind. In any case I'm not holding my breath on this one.

Also bizarre: the price just dropped to 108.63 in the last couple of hours (for me at least - I dunno if Amazon is up to its old antics with personalizing prices). Just think, if this keeps happening, in a couple of weeks we'll be able to get the box for $40.

That's bizarre. "May require an extra 1 to 2 days to process"? I wonder where they are sourcing these from?

We do? What was the last movie that made you doubled over with laughter? I appreciated Annie Hall and chuckled through it, but it didn't leave me gasping for breath like some of the more absurd and stupid parts of The Hangover.

Well, sure, we all have, but when you're dealing with written correspondence like that, you're not dealing with a faceless person. You're dealing with somebody who may very well be not unlike yourself, a front-line staffer who's doing the gig to make their nut, not because they really get off on any kind of a power trip. But that's kind of Thorne's point, I think. These people may only do this kind of stupid, soul-draining, often antisocial work because they have to make a living, but they still do it. I can see how people could see an adolescent solipsism in that ("I am a CREATIVE INDIVIDUAL and the rest of you are stupid soulless drones in the machine!") but hell, there's a reason we tend to laugh the hardest at dumb adolescent humor. And the cat thing, well, that's funny because a) it would take virtually zero effort for the coworker to have done an acceptable-looking version herself; b) the coworker not only is demanding it be done immediately, but also is leaving work in the middle of the day and isn't even considerate enough to ask him if that's OK; c) if Thorne's impression of her work is accurate, the 5 minutes spent in MS Paint would only be cutting into her time goofing off and socializing at work; d) she can't come downstairs and just discuss this request with him in person? Thorne's managed to take what would ordinarily be a really sad situation and make the character in it just unsympathetic and manipulative enough that we don't feel too bad when Thorne turns the tables and toys with her.

I think virtually all of them have been cleverly fabricated. That said, aside from the Missy one, which plays on a relatively powerless person's bereavement for their pet, most of them are taking on people with some degree of authority or power. Who hasn't wanted to exact this kind of revenge on self-important cops or faceless corporations?

this was the one that started it all for me: http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html

Listened to "Delirium" on Tadd Dameron's Fontainebleau today and thought this guy sounded almost like a cross between early Hank Mobley and Charlie Rouse. (There's a little lick at 1:10 that Rouse used all the time.) Anyone else hear this resemblance? And is much known of Alexander? The Lewis Porter Coltrane bio appears to have a sentence or two on him but I can't see more than the preview in Google Books.

You haven't been in an American school recently, have you? Many urban schools now feature metal detectors and the Supreme Court has held that students in school do not enjoy the usual complement of rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. I had a douchebag assistant principal in high school who insisted on bringing in rent-a-cop goons to rifle through people's bags to search for weapons, even though our high school consisted of 400 arts students. We're talking about a place with only about 140 straight men in it. I remember exactly one fistfight - the idea of someone bringing in a weapon to school was absurd. Only rational explanation I can think of is that maybe he was covering his own ass by complying with a districtwide policy handed down to all principals to enforce. FWIW, I think people are probably forgetting that this kid's school is only about a half hour's drive from Littleton. Not that that excuses it, but I can certainly understand why people in this area would be touchy about anything depicting the violent deaths of teachers...

The mother of all 419 scam threads: Thomas Mallory vs. Albert Abossi

Ah, thanks. I was looking at that but had lazily skimmed over the part on track times. The "These Foolish Things" edit is even weirder than Losin describes it: listening more closely, it sounds to me like they repeated that particular chunk of Bird's solo because the chunk starts with him quoting the head of the tune. Therefore, they probably thought they could get away with passing it off as the actual way the head was played if they just threw it in at the beginning of the track.

I recently bought the Savoy/Denon/Nippon Columbia CD An Evening At Home With the Bird, but just realized a couple of things: 1) This session (discussed here in more detail) appears on the Savoy Jazz Originals 4-CD box Charlie Parker: The Complete Live Performances On Savoy, which came out in 1998 and which I own. So it appears I duplicated this session accidentally and can probably sell the single CD. 2) HOWEVER...the track times do not line up. The tracks on the single CD are longer. "There's a Small Hotel" is 10:51 on the single CD, but only 10:14 on the box. The most elongated is "These Foolish Things," which is 3:54 on the CD but only 2:06(!!) on the box. So...what the heck happened here? Listening to the version of "These Foolish Things" from the box, it sounds like the track starts in the middle, during Bird's solo. Did Orrin Keepnews intentionally cut portions of the music to save playing time on the box, or is there some other explanation like different sources being used?

Don't know the answer to your question, but I have always wondered why the CD credits BOTH Hampton Hawes AND his pseudonym of Henry McDode. Does either version of the LP do the same? Excellent, underrated record BTW.

I don't know if the term was coined by David Baker, but I remember reading it long ago in one of his bebop books. See the third post in this thread for a halfway lucid explanation: http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/showthread.php?t=14436 An example is the pickup to bar 5 of Donna Lee. Maybe not the most classic case (because the note being enclosed is the 11th of the Bb minor chord rather than a more basic chord tone like the 3rd) but seems like it fits to me.

Got the code this morning and successfully applied it. Guess they had to have an engineer come in and fix the bug in the morning...

BW, LivingSocial is punishing you for getting the free card! That actually is truer than you might think. A cursory search on Twitter suggests that it's only people who maxed out their referrals who are seeing this error.

Annoyingly, I got an email confirmation but am getting an error message when I try to get the card code. I am not impressed, as this is the second time I've used LivingSocial and also the second time things have not gone smoothly. (The first time the merchant decided unilaterally not to honor the coupons, which is understandably not LS's fault except you'd think they would do a better job of picking good merchants and communicating clearly with them what the deal terms are.)

If you use this link to buy, I get credit for the referral: (EDIT: Took down link so someone else can post theirs, as I've already received the maximum credit of 3 referrals - thanks!)

That is actually really cool in the way you can code notation relatively simply. I think the main reasons it wouldn't be used here though are: -99.9% of the discussions here are non-technical, along the lines of "whoa, that Bird record is awesome" rather than "let's examine how Bird used enclosures to ornament the chord tones on the ii-V-Is on Donna Lee." That's the main reason the little-used "Musician's Forum" exists here - to wall off the nerdy musician-speak from the rest of the board, which couldn't care less about such things. -Those of us who occasionally engage in the other 0.1% are probably too lazy to learn how to use the feature.

I think virtually every Reform or Conservative synagogue uses at least a few - that's how popular her music was among cantors and rabbis.

Via Dave Liebman's newsletter. I'm getting reallllly sick of xtranormal videos but sometimes the dialogue is just too good.

I saw Jamire Williams with Jacky Terrasson a few months ago. The cat can really play.