Big Wheel

I must be the only person in California who thinks that In-and-Out is only marginally better than McDonald's. Maybe my local franchise is just unrepresentative?

This ain't much wackier than tying a string around your entire neighborhood just so you can carry stuff around.

that ain't hebrew! I'm pretty sure that is Hebrew - in cursive rather than block letters. The loop looks exactly like a cursive letter ayin. I'm not sure what the long line is but I think it's either a vav or a lamed. [Oops - maybe it's a nun. See http://www.nana.co.il]

I think that if the goal is to attract listeners who are used to pop and whatnot, going with primarily swing and bop and hard bop is a dubious strategy. You have to assess your audience and figure out what their frame of reference is. Here's a playlist I recently made for a friend who is primarily into whatever indie pap is hot: Aaron Goldberg, Worlds: "Lambada de Serpiente" Dave Douglas, Keystone: "Famous Players" Gilad Atzmon, Exile: "La Cote Mediterranee" Duke Ellington, Far East Suite: "Isfahan" Hank Mobley, Hank Mobley and His All Stars: "Don't Walk" Kurt Rosenwinkel, Heartcore: "Thought About You" Maria Schneider, Evanescence: "My Lament" Woody Shaw, Stepping Stones: "Blues for Ball" Larry Goldings, Moonbird: "I Think It's Going to Rain Today"

Henry Louis Gates once called me "little brother." I've flown on planes with Manny Ramirez and KC and the Sunshine Band. One of Eddie Money's roadies screamed at me never to touch his band's equipment. If I hadn't been 17 at the time I would have thought of the ultimate retort: "You're one of Eddie Money's roadies."

I also have a nice Trek hybrid. Unfortunately, I was not accustomed to riding on anything but nice flat East Coast terrain and took a nasty ass-over-teakettle spill going down a relatively small slope in SF the day after I bought it. Embarrassing, but I never learned that using the front brakes when going downhill is a big no-no. It hasn't left the garage too much after that...sadly, my neighborhood is just too hilly and frankly, I'm starting to wonder if the bike is just too big for me to ride it properly (if I try to lean over the back wheel when going downhill, I can barely reach the handlebars).

It is: James Man.

Medical science hasn't determined that the level of chemicals or lead is sufficient to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA has. And because of that highly dubious finding, and the litigious nature of our society, GE had to add that warning. Unbelievable. You can't imagine how relieved I am to live in Florida, where, obviously, I'm safe from any such "threat" - and you can't imagine how relieved I am not to be living in California, for other reasons. pssst....there are things out there called search engines. They help you find, you know, actual information about things. So you don't have to languish in ignorance. Information like this: IOW, California adopted Proposition 65, which requires this text on certain products, because people had reason to be concerned that the federal government wasn't going far enough to regulate toxic substances. Note that the level of whatever substance it is does matter - businesses can become exempt from the warning if they can show that no significant risk results from exposure. But probably a lot of businesses are too lazy to do this, so they just slap the warning label on there instead. I think shifting the burden of proof from government regulators to businesses is a good thing.

That word, a priori. I do not think it means what you think it means. um, yes it does. Wikipedia is your friend, but you're taking its philosophical definition out of context from how it's used in other applications. As in: yeah, okay, nobody is going to legally prohibit me from saying something, but if I say it I'm going to get in so much trouble that I'd better not say it after all. The result is the same: one is prevented from saying something out of fear of repercusion and reprisal. Except that there's nothing that can be deduced as a "necessarily related" effect in this case. "Necessarily" means that B must logically follow as a result of A, but there's nothing nearly so deducible in this case. For example, I think there's a loose consensus that Howard Stern could probably get away with saying the exact same words and not get fired (because it's much more clear that it's part of his shtick, and not the "real" Howard Stern talking), so there's no good reason to deduce that Don Imus's firing can only produce the outcome of a chilling effect on everyone else's speech. I still think "de facto" would have been a much better choice. (Sorry, the misuse of a priori along with people who screw up "e.g." and "i.e." is a pet peeve.)

That word, a priori. I do not think it means what you think it means.

There's at least a distinction being made between calling all women "'hos" - which is what Eric seemed to say he was doing - and calling a small subset of women he considers to be 'hos "'hos". I agree that it's still not a very sensitive comment.

Wrong. As loath as I am to defend Snoop, this is what he actually said:

Hell yeah. As a commenter on a different forum put it, (slightly edited for anonymity)

First of all, could anyone point me to something Jesse Jackson said that was so irresponsible in the case? All I've been able to turn up of substance are a fairly circumspect op-ed and the widespread reports of the Rainbow Coalition offering to pay the "victim's" tuition. As for the tuition payment, I don't see what the big deal is - Jackson didn't say "we're doing this because guilty whitey deserves it," he said that they wanted to make sure that the woman would never again have to "stoop so low" as exotic dancing to have to put herself through college. Well, WTF is wrong with that? Why does it seem like every time there's an incident involving a racist white person, there's an inevitable chorus of middle-aged white males pointing to Something Irresponsible Jesse Jackson Supposedly Did Too?

Yes, because we all know that a rush to judgment based on incomplete information is somehow the same kind of thing as a pointless and completely unprovoked racial slur. "Wah wah wah, Don Imus said some mean things about black people. But Jesse Jackson said some mean things about white people! I can't tell the difference."

I'm filing this post under "Sentences I Never Ever Thought I Would Read."

I assumed that PR was the whole point. If you want instant connection to the community of pro musicians, it seems to me that that community is mostly centered on Myspace. For example: Vijay Iyer Wadada Leo Smith Charlie Haden Roy Haynes Jack Dejohnette If you want a website where you can write articles or a place to post your thoughts on various topics on an ongoing basis, or a place where you can post photos of your family, by all means get a blog. If you don't think you'll update it very often, then maybe something more static than a blog would suit your needs better.

For a musician? Probably MySpace. It looks kinda crappy, but everyone is on it, you get instant buzz among musicians you know, and best of all, it's free.

one thing I forgot to mention: Google AdSense actually doesn't allow porn ads for the most part, so if you're seeing porn links on weird-looking websites, they are most likely part of a different advertising network or affiliated with the porn providers directly.

I think it's easiest to understand all this stuff if you think of it this way: the business of the Internet today revolves around drawing eyeballs to websites. That's why, for example, Jim Alfredson experimented with putting ads on the Organissimo forum for a time - Jim got paid a little bit every time people clicked on the ads and visited the advertisers' websites, just as he gets paid a little bit now for people who visit CDUniverse through the forum and eventually make purchases. But other people are a lot lazier than Jim is - they aren't willing or able to build a real community of people, but they still want to make money by driving eyeballs to people's sites. So they resort to activities that sucker people into clicking ads and so forth. There's nothing usually very special about the fact that the ads are porn ads - it's just that porn ads are a hell of a lot more likely to get clicked on than ads for say, tractor parts. So it's more lucrative to a lazy person to host porn ads than to host tractor part ads.

This is most likely an annoying scheme to collect money on Google AdSense revenue. The links on the blog point to pages that host AdSense ads, which are probably owned by the blog owner. Why does the blog owner go to the trouble of creating a blog in the first place? Most likely, the Google search results algorithm is smart enough to penalize his content-free AdSense-only pages, placing them very low in the search results and making them very hard to reach. So he has to try finding other ways of driving traffic cheaply to the ads, and linking like crazy from a blog might get ranked higher by search engines than his ads-only pages do. You can try reporting these kinds of pages to the Blogger support team when you see this kind of spammy behavior on Blogspot blogs. See here for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_blog

I agree that no. 1 above is folly. And I will also agree that no. 2 works. But -- I would speculate that well over half the "rich" in this country got there by either investing in real estate or as I mentioned above - owning some/all of a business. God forbid, neither of these are risk free and both involve hard work and a willingness to make sacrifices. But it can be done and without connections or a fancy degree. Sure, which is why I threw in the "some kinds of self-employment" part. But real estate is risky and a big time drain, and most working people don't have the time to learn it the way they should. And starting a business is also really risky - 95% of small businesses fail within the first 5 years, according to the SBA. I'd be interested in seeing more detailed ROI numbers on that...

Going back to the original post, it seems to me that most of the ten reasons are "things you should avoid doing so you don't become poor," rather than "things that are sufficient for helping you become wealthy." Even the best savings and investment in the markets won't get you *rich* - the markets are structured in a way that even the best-performing funds only can consistently garner you 15% or so a year. To get truly rich, you need to either: 1. Do something very very risky (invest in risky things like futures, or in more conventional instruments by buying on margin, or just throw all your eggs in one basket on a risky but very high-potential stock). Then again, as J Larsen notes, if you know a field really well you can probably get away with investing in something that everyone else thinks is risky, but you know to be a sure thing. 2. Go into a field with extremely high earning potential (law, banking, consulting, VC, some kinds of self-employment, being friends with Dick Cheney). It doesn't matter too much how well your investments do if you're making $400k a year. Obviously, not everyone has the means or the desire to do these things.

Here's a somewhat amusing yourmusic story. I kept my word and canceled my subscription back in January. A week or two ago I get one of those "customer retention" emails asking me to come back. So just for the hell of it, I replied to the email saying that I wasn't willing to pay $6.99, but if they could offer me the $5.99 price again I just might consider rejoining. About a week afterward I get an reply saying: "Thank you for contacting yourmusic.com. Your subscription has been canceled as requested."

Nothing but water. In fact, that's been my entire diet for the last 24 hours (hooray for food poisoning). Going to try some rice porridge in a bit to see how my stomach reacts...