Big Wheel

Craig Handy told this one during a long break at the Mingus Big Band show at the Iridium Tuesday night. Sy Johnson was working out one of the parts in section and instructed Craig to "say something funny" during the downtime: Three successful surgeons are sitting on a beach in Mexico. These guys are worth several million each and possess some of the world's biggest egos, so most of their time is spent bragging about themselves. The first doctor says, "Here's why I'm the greatest doctor in the world. A few years back I had a patient come in with seven severed fingers. Thanks to me, he played a Beethoven piano concerto at Carnegie Hall less than two years after the operation." The second doctor says, "That's nothing, you no-talent hack. Why, only last year I had a patient walk in and he had no arms or legs. Thanks to me, six months later he won a gold medal at the Summer Olympics in the 500 meter butterfly." The last doctor replies, "Please. I can't even believe I'm sitting on the same beach as you two losers. Here's why I'm the world's best doctor: Some time ago they brought me the remains of a guy who had been in an accident. He was riding a horse across the highway when he got blindsided by a semi. All that was left for me to work with was the horse's ass and a cowboy hat. And just look at him now!"

He'll always have a big fat asterisk next to his name as far as I'm concerned. No, not an asterisk - that's unfair to the likes of Roger Maris. Better to give him one of these: † ...the better to nail himself to.

Whoa, some of that guy's other videos are pretty sweet. The Stevie Wonder Superstition video is nasty, even if iit cuts off before the end. Is that Steve Cropper in the band?

It's not quite that awesome Giant Steps cartoon, but: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...wtopic=1083&hl=

Any board members in SF interested in going to an SFJazz or other show sometime? I'll be in NYC May 15-17 if anyone wants to hang...

Something even funnier happened when Steve Bernstein's Sex Mob forgot to renew its registration for sexmob.com : the domain was quickly snapped up not by people using links to...I guess to increase search results for certain porn sites, but by actual pornographers. This is why they had to move to sexmobmusic.com . edit: looks like sexmob.com is now just a link farm as well...

Shmuley Boteach: assclown.

what the hell are you talking about [/contemporaryladySF] figure it out. Duh, I tried but I'm a little unclear on what "this thing" refers to. Iraq? Afghanistan? A period characterized by general public ignorance? Anyway, it's not really my style to trash people who aren't even out of high school so I'll shut up now.

what the hell are you talking about [/contemporaryladySF]

As of Thursday, there are now street maps available at Google Maps for a healthy chunk of Europe. Where before street maps only covered the UK, Ireland, and Torino (to commemorate the Olympics) now all of Europe is covered, with the exceptions of the Balkans, Romania and Bulgaria, and the post-Soviet states. Oh, and the Greece map seems a bit, er, rudimentary once you leave Athens, though that could just be my ignorance of Greek geography. But my question is: Where's Claude?

So I take it that you didn't see "The Killing Fields" or "Schindler's List"? How is this film any different? Less than a year after 9/11, cartoonist Art Speigleman ran a full page monthy comic strip about his recollection of the event called "In the Shadow of No Towers." Was that "exploitative and in bad taste" too? I mean, my God, a COMIC STRIP? On 9/11? And yet it works. Not very good comparisons, IMO. I admit to not having seen "The Killing Fields,", but it's not like it was made by and for Cambodians. "The Killing Fields" from what I understand of it is a wake-up call to the West, a reminder that these kinds of atrocities happen in the world even as our media ignores them and we sleep soundly at night. I think it's pretty clear that "Flight 93" can't claim that about itself. "Schindler's List" to me isn't a movie about a massacre so much as it's a portrait of a man who did something exceptional in the midst of one. I suppose you can argue that "Flight 93" is no different in this regard, but to me it's the difference between people with nothing to lose and a person who had everything to lose. Not saying that both weren't heroic, just that depictions of the first have a lot higher artistic bar to clear in my mind than depictions of the second. And there's a pretty significant difference between films and comic books. You read a graphic novel (or just a regular novel, for that matter) and it's obvious that it's an artistic rendering of reality, like a painting. Films by their nature are so much more vivid that the line between artist and event gets much more blurred. The more realistic the art form, the closer things like this can seem to disaster porn.

We have a new champion, ladies and gentlemen: Stinky tofu. So I'm wandering through San Francisco Chinatown today kind of aimlessly, and I just keep getting hungrier and hungrier. I start looking for a no-frills dumpling joint, not really a restaurant, just a place where I can grab a few cheap pork or shrimp dumplings and then maybe sit down somewhere and scarf them to tide me over until dinner. I go back and forth and can't find the one place I know is like this. So I just wander down Washington Street and I finally see a place that's more of a lunch counter, and they've got no dim sum, but the menu outside mentions 4 "weekend specialties", one of which is "spicy bean curd". Well, I loves me some good tofu, and the spicier the better. And a lot of people seem to be eating there for the weird hour of 3 pm. And it's only 4 bucks. I sit myself down at one of the stools at the counter and realize that this place is even dodgier than I thought while standing outside. But fortunately, my seat is right in front of the health inspection chart that restaurants here are required by law to display, and this place got a 95 out of 100! Then I squint a little harder at it. That is not a 9. It's a 7. In my seven weeks in this city, I have managed to patronize a whole lot of restaurants. I have never even seen a restaurant here that scored below 92. I begin to be afraid. Also, this place fucking reeks. "Spicy bean curd," I say to the nice girl behind the counter. She reacts like she did not hear me correctly, but five hours into the aftermath, I'm beginning to suspect that she was just in shock. I point to the line on the menu to make it clear what I am ordering. She nods solemnly. "Chou Dou-fu," she calls to the man hovering over the stove. Oh, fuck. I'm pretty into Asian food, and, although I've never tried it, I think I know what Chou Dou-fu is. This is no spicy tofu, no nice comforting ma-bo to-fu with some yummy pork and chili sauce. This is stinky tofu, the stuff of legend. something my outdated cookbooks had been led me to believe cannot even be found in this country. And I have just accidentally ordered it. If you ever order something tofu-ish in a very authentic Eastern Chinese or Taiwanese restaurant and hear the word chou in front of dou-fu, I suggest you run. Don't worry about offending the management or not asking for the check. If you have already been served appetizers or beverages, throw a sawbuck on the table and get the fuck out of there. Back to me. At this point, every single customer sitting at the counter audibly gasps. I shit you not. Eight or nine Chinese people inhaled in unison upon hearing what I was eating. Even though some of them were eating it themselves, they could not believe that the geeky white boy had just ordered chou dou-fu. "You like the smelly tofu?" the woman next to me says, incredulous. "There's a first time for everything," I reply sheepishly. Everyone in the place laughs. There's way more nervousness in that laugh than I feel comfortable with. "You are very brave," she says. The seat of my pants and the top of my barstool are beginning to disagree with her assessment. What is stinky tofu like? The bad news: contrary to accounts I have read describing the smell as fecal, it smells like a rotting corpse that no one has attended to for two weeks. The good news: It tastes like a corpse that has only been left out for about 48 hours. I ate the whole plate, all 12 or so cubes. They got slightly more tolerable the more I ate, but I'm not sure whether this was due to oral numbness or simple determination to soldier through to the end so as not to look like an ungrateful asshole. I pay and stumble out, realizing that I have reached my gastronomical limit. This is the only thing I have ever eaten that I cannot see myself ever eating again. I search for a nice bubble tea place to try and take the taste out of my mouth with the sweetness. It does almost nothing. I keep burping up the aftertaste of stinky tofu. I grab some leftover, end-of-the-day beef dumplings from a dim sum joint, which help a little bit, but the aftertaste doesn't fully disappear until I get home and down a cold beer. Why is the inside of my mouth still tingling, though? I thought it might be the bacteria on the tofu, but I brushed my teeth and everything still feels funny. I wanted to write the definitive essay on stinky tofu, but it looks like I've been beaten to the punch. This is the same exact place I went to. One of the other patrons of the establishment mentioned to me that it's "the best, it has the smelliest one." I don't want to contemplate what second-rate versions must be like.

Dug up this thread to mention that I finally got the Zeppelin DVD set last weekend and have been watching it to get me going on the way to work in the mornings. I'm liking the acoustic material at Earl's Court much more than I expected - the version of Bron Y Aur Stomp grooves real nice and hasn't failed to put a smile on my face as I watch. BTW, I think it's hilarious that nobody at the time commented on the addition to Mnytime's canon of whoppers above.

Just enjoyed my first-ever one of these: Has anyone tried any of their other beers? How about the New Belgium Birre de Mars? Have seen that around and been intrigued... Also, I am trying to find good places to buy beer in this town. I have been wholly underwhelmed by the two Trader Joe's I've visited so far. BevMo seems somewhat better, but still fairly expensive and with limited selection. Anchor Steam/Liberty Ale was cheaper at the Trader Joe's in freakin' Boston; they don't even seem to carry it at TJ's here. Is it possible to find a 6-pack of the stuff for under $7?

There's a TV chef over here who cooked this stuff up on TV as an appetizer. I kid you not ! Hugh Fearnley- Whatshisface? I remember this 'earth-mother' type who wanted her friends to 'share' her childbirth experience. TV Dinners? Was that the show? Gross, but arguably no grosser than kopi luak.

Did them all by myself for the first time this year and used TurboTax Online (only $40 and free e-filing!). E-filing is great - doing them took about 3 hours and the return's been accepted by the IRS and the state DOR already. Too bad I owe about $70.

I went into more detail on this in a thread in the political forum, but this is covered in Al Gore's upcoming book and movie. I encourage you to check them out.

The point of the bulk uploads is to eliminate manual data entry - assuming you already have the data, of course. Stores use this feature to upload a ton of products at once. Interesting quesion on data portability. I know that they encourage you to have the data in a portable format before you add it to Google Base (that's why they talk about XML and so on for bulk uploads). The problem I forsee with porting data out is the labels attached to everything. I assume that's metadata, and I think the eventual goal is to use that to facilitate natural language queries. So there's probably a lot going on behind the scenes and a lot of data may be getting added that you can't see. I guess they could add a feature where you could still be able to port out all your original data, but a lot of the "meaning" - the way the system understands the data - could get lost.

Google Base is a thing Google put up to enter structured data onto Google, so I was thinking, why couldn't this work with discographies? As an example, I entered some data for True Blue into Google Base. (Clearly not perfect yet, but not too bad-looking, either.) The cool thing is that you can do "bulk uploads" of certain formats of data, so if you had things in a compatible format you could enter a ton of stuff very quickly. Does anyone know what format BRIAN uses to store its data? It could be a cool (and easy) project to get discographers to do uploads of their BRIAN listings, if they are in a compatible format. ...thinking about this a little more, I wonder if the best way to enter data is by each song, rather than each recording date? You can tag any data you like with identifying "labels", so it wouldn't be too difficult to group "Theme for Doris", "Good Old Soul," and so on together with a common "album" or "recording date" label. And you could group "recording dates" into sessionographies, and albums into discographies. Or something like that. And put up reviews. I notice AMG's interface has gotten kinda crappy lately. Maybe there's a better way...

The consensus around here is to use Exact Audio Copy ( http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ )in tandem with the LAME encoder (often comes already installed on EAC, I think) to copy CDs to your hard drive (aka "ripping" them). EAC has a built-in feature that should get track information from the internet. This information (including track order) is automatically entered into the new mp3 files. It can be a hassle to do this manually, which you sometimes have to do, especially when you are dealing with mp3s of live shows that have no wide-circulation CD out there. P.S.: Most people here hate Windows Media Player for ripping.

In other news, scientists have hypothesized that the water-to-wine miracle may have actually been accomplished by "some guy named Gary," according to James F. Lifshitz, professor of chemistry at Western Idaho University. "Ancient scrolls recently discovered around Beersheba mention that Gary was a big hit around the punchbowl."

Disagree completely. TV may not be the best way to get in-depth reporting (and perhaps even accuracy) but it's the best way to get breaking news and "you are there" coverage of an event. What, you'd rather wait up to 24 hours to read about it in the paper, a week for a magazine report, or even longer for the book? Radio has more limitations than TV, imo, and the internet has little credibility when it comes to breaking news. Duhhh....there's nothing TV news can do that the "breaking news" headline on CNN.com or another news site can't. Or, at least, nothing particularly newsworthy. I don't need to see every house slowly sinking underwater or every additional person that jumps from the building to accurately get the gist.

Them's fightin' words, bub! Trader Joes is one of the best grocery store chains on the planet, and I miss 'em something fierce down here... I've never been to one (I think the nearest one is in the Detroit area, but I could be wrong)... I just keep hearing about them and how great they are and it makes me think that they'll soon take over the world, like Sam's Club or something, and drive all the local guys out of business. A new Trader Joe's just opened here in Albuturkey, but I haven't been yet (there's been one open in Santa Fe for a couple of years). We always stock up on the nototrious "Two Buck Chuck"; Charles Stewart, a drinkable California wine for two bucks a bottle ($2 in CA, $3 here in NM). Need to check out the pickle aisle, I guess. Actually, it's Charles Shaw, not Stewart. I miss having a Trader Joe's a 10 minute walk away. I almost never bought the gourmet prepared stuff, but as has been noted, they can't be beat on staples like bread, milk, and eggs. They are also my favorite place to buy beer and wine. Many of the wines are roughly 25% cheaper than you would find in a liquor store - the delicious Lolonis organic fume blanc is like $11 at TJ's versus $15 at most other places. And the store's beer buyers seem to have some a knack for getting great deals, though the selection is limited. Definitely the only place in Boston where you could get a 6-pack of the Anchor Liberty Ale for $6.99, and local microbrews sometimes for under $5.50. Maybe I'll make a run to one of the SF stores this weekend...too bad they're so much further away now.

I had trouble getting used to the idea of putting pickles on a falafel or other Middle Eastern-type sandwich. It doesn't seem right to me, for some reason, yet I was told that's the most authentic way to do it. The Falafel Palace in Cambridge's Central Square was the first time I had the combination, sometime last year. How about non-cucumber pickles? My grandfather used to pickle unripe tomatoes, and one of my father's friends used to do habanero peppers, or something like that. I've done a couple of kimchi experiments - the first batch came out pretty good, the second, not so much (but the carbon dioxide buildup in the jar did lead to hilarious results when I opened the thing). I'm sure I wasn't doing it the authentic Korean way, though...aren't you supposed to bury the jar in the ground or something?

Answer: enough people to make it worthwhile to continue manufacturing these things. The cars and trucks that GM is making today is the result of decisions made many years ago. Let's hope things are considerably different 10 years from now. And the core of the problem is not the car manufacturers, but us. All of us. The hybrids may be a good start, but I'm still astounded (disillusioned?) that we haven't seen any serious talk about better public transportation. Heck, how about just carpool lanes -- if California can do it, why not SE Michigan? High speed rail? Incidentally, I seriously looked at buying an Accord Hybrid. The numbers just don't add up, unless you are driving an obscene number of miles per year. Erik, I also read many articles on the subject, and the bottom line (from a purely financial perspective) is that Hybrids, in many cases, aren't the most economical choice. For one thing, the layout of newer cities (versus the East Coast, SF to some extent, and the core of LA) makes it a lot tougher to create well-functioning rail systems with a non-crazy price tag. At least that's how I understand it. Car pool lanes should sort of be an obvious short-term solution, as long as they can be shown to not make traffic in the other lanes way more awful. In fact, I'm riding in the carpool lane on the 101 Freeway as I type this post! One company I know of is giving $5000 on top of the federal tax break to employees if they buy a hybrid. That makes it pretty close to a smart financial decision as well as an environmentally friendly one.