Big Wheel

Dublin Dr Pepper! Also sampled a rather interesting soda today made from pinot noir grape juice and carbonated water. Not bad.

I saw this stuff in my local hippie grocery store last weekend: http://www.realbeer.com/blog/?p=234

Blech. Red Bull tastes like warmed over ass, especially the sugar free version. It doesn't work for me, either - I experimented with it during an all-nighter in college, with near-disastrous results.

That's gotta be a dub. Still hilarious, though.

Call Jackson--he'll make it right. Indeed he did. I even get to keep the Miller CD "as a gift from Concord"!

Did you have the accents to go with those names? Only on very rare and very special occasions. Deipanjan Chandrasekhar's voice is like a cross between Apu on The Simpsons and the angry South Asian terrorist-type character on The Jerky Boys CDs.

I received my order last night and it appears that Concord made a couple of mistakes. I didn't get San Francisco Suite and Tom Ball's Guitar Music at all, even though they were on the packing slip, and I did get Dale Miller's Fingerpicking Rags, even though I didn't order it. Naturally I blame you guys for calling in all the time and rushing them.

Never used a nom de guerre in a musical or radio setting. However, in a previous job I was essentially a corporate spy, crank-calling secretaries at companies large and small and sweet-talking them into blabbing the names of the companies' executives. For obvious reasons, we always blocked caller ID and almost always called under assumed names. I figured that the more "non-generic" the name, the more plausible it was to a secretary. So before long "Joe Perkins" and "Brian Stevens" began to assume much more interesting heritages. Suffice it to say that some of America's largest and proudest banks never knew what hit them when "Carlos Martinez" and "Deipanjan Chandrasekhar" started calling in...

Jesus. How does such a thing even happen? I've never even heard of people getting stung by stingrays except by stepping on them. edit: I guess I'm used to only the garden variety stingray. "The giant Australian stingray can reach 6 to 7 feet across the wings and weigh 750 pounds." Why are all the animals in Australia 10 times scarier than any animal anywhere else?

Wait a minute...are you in the UK? I'm really only familiar with the big American companies, although you can most likely set up brokerage/retirement accounts with American companies too, of course.

HELLyeah! That's what I do! ... but diversification is the way to go. Depending on your age, you want to balance equity and income funds appropriately. And as far as fund fees, you should rarely (if ever) pay more than 1% - and never a "load". There are more and more "lifestyle" funds available from major fund houses, too (Vanguard, T Rowe Price, etc.). You pick a retirement year and it will rebalance itself over time. how can an individual purchase no-loads? all my people are pushing their load funds, of course, and this is what bothers me. It's pretty simple if you have a basic brokerage account. The Fidelity website prominently advertises theirs. I recommend doing some research on the Fidelity and Vanguard websites, as well as Yahoo/Google Finance. If you want to shell out some coin there are some good publications out there on mutual funds, too. Which of the big fund houses is your brokerage/advisor affiliated with?

All three of these technological advances are more than 20 years old.

Has anyone been to the Berkeley or Fremont stores? Are they worth a cross-Bay trip?

In case anyone finds it useful, I called Concord and they thought that this was probably the case.

Ditto! The stuff is delicious and I try to have a 6 of it in the fridge at all times. I tried the Black Butte Porter at a bar a few weeks back--I'm generally not a huge fan of the darker beers, but this is a damn good one too.

Wonderful...for my order on August 6 I tried to pay with one of those stupid "use anywhere" gift Visa debit cards that I got as a present from a well-meaning but misguided parent. (Psst...there's a wonderful version of the "use anywhere" gift card that's existed for years - it's called a check.) I registered the card and everything for Internet purchases, then I look at the balance today and see that apparently Concord declined ("reversed") the transaction anyway, despite sending me that first order confirmation. Fantastic...it's gonna be a fun day on the phone Monday. Is it possible that I'm looking at some kind of pre-authorization that will actually go through once they fill the order and ship?

It's amazing to me that they've had this sale for going on two months now and there are still large numbers of things that haven't sold out. What are they going to do if all this stuff is still sitting in the warehouse in October, discount it to $.99 per CD?

I recommend putting a big bag of nuts out there so you can attract his whole family and wipe them all out in one fell swoop. If fighting the squirrels outside so you don't have to fight them inside doesn't work, don't worry, there'll probably be lots of infighting over the nuts anyway and they won't be so concerned with your apartment anymore. I call this the squirrelpaper theory.

I liked this one too, when I lived in an apartment with cable. But then I really enjoy Bourdain's writing also. My favorite episode was when he got a traditional massage in Uzbekistan, which more or less consisted of a nearly naked Uzbek guy climbing on his back and being rather...vigorous. Not having cable or a large TV screen are the keys to quitting. We have a 14 inch TV with only broadcast and I haven't even turned the thing on since I moved in in April. Of course, not actually having a sofa or other place to sit also helps.

Little known fact: Both of the pianists on Haynes's last two records held down the piano chair in my high school combo a few years before I did.

Jaleel Shaw is certainly not a complete unknown - he is a regular in the current version of the Mingus Big Band, playing alongside Seamus Blake, Craig Handy, Ronnie Cuber, and Abraham Burton in the sax section. He also released a record two years ago on Fresh Sound.

Dad loves 'em boiled; I can't stand 'em! Why would you boil peanuts? What do they taste like? Guy Friggin' delicious. Of course, I barely remember what they taste like after I tried them for the first time at age 10, ate at least 4 pounds of the goddamn things in one sitting, and then crawled out of bed at 4 AM and was the most violently ill I've ever been in my life. Haven't touched them since (though that's partly because I've barely spent any time in the Deep South since). It's probably unlikely that overeating made me that sick - more likely I just had a coincidental stomach bug or food poisoning. But the mental association is still there.

Salt actually accentuates the taste of sugar. You have to be careful not to overdo it, of course, but there are a lot of recipes that take advantage of this property of salt. Prosciutto is pretty salty, and the prosciutto/melon combination is an Italian classic. In Malaysia they combine ripe pineapple with other, more sour fruit and dress it in a sauce based on salty shrimp paste and sugar to make rojak. (I'm not really a fan based on the one time I tried Penang rojak - I'd be perfectly happy eating straight pineapple.)

That's Ernesto Hoost, a Dutch kickboxing champion. He travels a lot to Japan for matches, I think, so he's probably fairly popular there. Here's another in the "Japanese humiliation humor" category: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gNsDp2N6yM...m?link_id=18151

Don't forget the great chapter from Jon Stewart's first book, Naked Pictures of Famous People. Chapter title: "Martha Stewart's Vagina."