Big Wheel

I'm talking to him right now (not at all a jazz-related matter). Anything I should ask him?

Those of you in the NYC, Albany, and Seattle areas might also want to consider giving the loose change to another worthy cause: Common Cents

I don't think this was a slip. I think it was a deliberate attempt to provoke, which is something very different. If you've ever seen The Aristocrats, you know that even great, respected comedians have some nasty, nasty shit "inside" them.

After finally watching the video, I think it's obvious that Richards owes everyone a big apology. But I don't think it necessarily "proves" that Michael Richards is a racist to the core. I see a guy flying off the handle and reaching for the biggest weapon he can find in the arsenal. Only problem: it didn't come off as funny at all, and rather than try and find a graceful out, he foolishly decided to stick with the thing and see where it led. When your entire job revolves around not being taken seriously, you're probably going to confuse even yourself some of the time.

Via Bill Simmons, this version of O Canada gives me chills every time. . The Mighty Ducks goalie in this video looks exactly like my buddy Mike. La Marseillaise has the goriest lyrics ever!

This is a secondhand story, so take it for what it's worth. I never really could fathom before that Michael Richards was just kind of a douche, but this story is now a whole lot more plausible in light of this latest incident IMO: Around 1998 this guy I know - let's call him Seppo - was playing a solo piano gig at a famous cafe on Miami Beach. Seppo was a visiting student from Finland and for this story to make sense, you have to understand that he did almost nothing else but practice. He ate, breathed, and slept piano, to the exclusion of just about everything else in his life. Seppo was a badass, but his complete obsession with music meant that he got poor grades in every other subject and knew almost nothing of American pop culture despite having lived in the States for at least a couple of years. Anyway, Seppo is playing cocktail piano one afternoon outdoors, and this lanky guy comes up to him. He lounges against the piano, looks at Seppo, and says: "Do you know who I am??" Seppo just stares at him. "Uh..." The guy doesn't wait for a guess. "I'm Kramer." Still a blank stare. "You know, on Seinfeld." Sure enough, it was actually Michael Richards. Seppo pauses for a second and says: "Ohhhhh. Is that like Oprah?"

Particle board may make fine quality furniture, but there's no way I'd ever build my house out of the stuff if I lived in an area affected by hurricanes. In fact, I believe it's banned as a building material in Miami.

I seem to remember corresponding with her when I was trying to track down the Noah Howard Village Vanguard material for a radio show. She referred me to Noah, who eventually sent in a CD-R of it, though it was too late for it to make it onto the show. I'm not sure what their current relationship is...

Benny Reid is a nice guy and a good young alto player. And the guitar player on that CD is someone who has played one of my tunes!

Wow, looks like the end of the Dallas-Washington game was crazy.

There's no Hebrew, it's gibberish composed of a mixture of made-up words and words in Russian/Polish/Uzbeki/etc. that don't amount to what they are being interpreted as in "translation". By all accounts I've read the "made-up words" are actually mostly Hebrew, though he does throw in stuff from other languages. His sidekick is apparently speaking Armenian. Parts of the movie are obviously staged, but with many of the bits (the elevator, the bed and breakfast, the frat boys) it's very, very difficult to tell. If they pulled those parts off completely unstaged, they are amazing. I wonder how much footage got left on the cutting-room floor when the targets didn't end up being funny enough.

Just go see the Borat movie, people. Only flaw: it should be 30 minutes longer.

side Q1: can any Bostonians or Boston people say where ('hoods i mean) the exteriors were done? There are some shots of City Hall Plaza downtown, and a skyline shot of downtown that was taken from across the channel in South Boston. Other than that I didn't recognize much - the river/harbor scenes mostly take place at night and it was hard to tell where exactly they take place. I think I remember seeing one daytime shot around the Longfellow Bridge near the Hatch Shell, but it might have been a different bridge.

Checked the Market Street store again today. 15-20% off most music, which isn't enough for me to bite yet. A lot of people seemed to be buying, though.

I would try staying off of it if at all possible. These usually go away by themselves, but if it's been 10 days it's time to change the routine if you can. You've probably heard the phrase "soft tissue trauma" from your doctor already. What did the doctor tell you to do? (My hunch is something like "give it time, you may want to put it in a splint but you don't have to, and here are some gentle exercises that will strengthen whatever tendons/ligaments got stretched.")

After getting sacked 7 times some "champion" caliber players are left wondering why there are three head linesmen on the field all of a sudden.

Did any of you guys check this out when I posted it to the Youtube thread awhile back?

That one is a magnificent little composition for orchestra that loses something essential when reduced to a blowing vehicle. It also helps none that almost everybody plays it just a little faster than Duke did. But Duke's tempo really allowed for the inner sax voicings (which are really pretty off-the-wall - and Gonsalves is playing lead!) to speak, and if you don't have those in there, why bother? Or so they seem to think... I think this aspect of standards is under-recognized - not everything works in every context. I love Cole Porter's "Get Out of Town," especially the Clarke-Boland and Anita O'Day big band versions. But it's extremely tough to make it work as a solo piano or even a piano trio version, and very few pianists do the tune.

They can tell you in Buffalo! Goes back farther than that. Belichick recognized the guy was a dud and replaced him with a green Tom Brady. Yeah, we know Brady is one of the best qbs in the league, but he wasn't one back then. Bledsoe is simply awful. He's capable of good games, but he has always been maddeningly inconsistent. I'm not sure I agree with this analysis. Bledsoe is not very dependable in the clutch, but in 2005 had relatively weak support from the other skill players. Neither Julius Jones nor Marion Barber had played a full, healthy season of football when last season began - Jones was a rookie in 2004 and was injured, and Barber was a rookie in 2005. Note that the Cowboys in 2005 averaged 3.57 rushing yards per attempt - 26th in the NFL, despite running the ball more times than every team but four. The main receiving talent (Peerless Price) ended up getting injured. Terry Glenn was solid, but aging. Keyshawn Johnson has always been an overhyped position receiver. The only player who outperformed expectations was TE Jason Witten.

Same thing at the store on Market in SF. I'll have to check the other SF stores next weekend (is the Stonestown one any good? How about the one down in Mountain View?)

Make sure you bring your earplugs if you plan on spending more than 3 minutes in a Newbury Comics. They blare the latest crap from Incubus or whoever all the time. Kids these days! Third the recommendations for Jack's. I miss it!

I've gone through about 60 so far, maybe 70. Because a lot of it is straight-ahead stuff from the late '50s/early '60s, I've generally been alternating one Concord sale CD with either another new CD or an old CD I haven't listened to in awhile, usually from a different period or style. Keeps things varied.

Ah, I had the date slightly off. Cuba's economy started tanking when the Warsaw Pact regimes started crumbling in 1989, not when the USSR broke apart in 1991. Cuban GDP fell 35% from 1989 to 1993, at which point it started rising again. At 3.7% a year from 1995 onward, that means it took Cuba about a decade to get back to where it was in 1989.

1) I don't think the two necessarily contradict each other. F is talking about a multi-decade period starting in the mid 60s. B is talking about the period since 1986. It's possible that education spending rose in the mid-60s and then fell after 1986. Unfortunately I don't have data on Irish education spending. 2) F agrees with B about the importance of fiscal tightening to Ireland's growth miracle. It probably helped facilitate Ireland's investment boom. Guy My point in 1) is that I think Brenner is cherry-picking dates to suit a laissez-faire agenda (that is, that one of his overarching goals in this piece is to prove the point that "cutting education spending good, all government spending bad"). To do this, he has to overlook any years that suggest that education spending over a long period was actually very important to growth later down the road. I'm not denying that human capital and fiscal discpline are important determinants of economic success. But Brenner seems to me to be clearly overreaching in an effort to make Ireland fit into the model of a right-wing capitalist utopia. IOW, I think it's sensible to look for correlations between human capital improvements and growth, but Brenner's test cases attempting to "prove" that this point is of supreme importance in explaining growth aren't very good at all. And the last paragraph just comes off as silly: "We have to get out of this backward, dictatorial shithole!" "You're right. Let's leave for the south of France!" "But their corporate taxes are so high and their fiscal discipline...not so good." "Shit! I guess we're stuck!" Perhaps this is being a little unfair to Brenner. I just have a tough time seeing how welcoming smart people here is going to magically be an effective "weapon" that will transform their home countries into happy singing liberal democracies.

Note that FitzGerald's analysis directly contradicts Brenner on the subject of investment in education. Starting in the 1960s the Irish government pumped a huge amount of cash into the Irish educational system. I'll bet that a look at the data will show that the 1986 retrenchment that Brenner lauds had little to do with how Ireland is doing today.