Big Wheel

Oh man...definitely psyched to see all those old clips of MTV's The State on there.

Translation: "Music made by a young middle-class* white guy from California doesn't meet my authenticity threshhold, therefore I'm incapable of appreciating it on its own terms." *Actually, Hunter didn't grow up "middle-class" at all, according to his online bio.

I should add that there are a couple of BN CDs still there that I have never seen in a store before: One was the Noel Pointer reissue from 1999, I don't remember the other.

I happened on this yesterday. Everything is 50% off. Most of the jazz CD stuff has been picked over at this point, but there is still plenty of vinyl left over. For under $18, I managed to snag Dr. Michael White's New Year's Eve at the Village Vanguard and the Anderza and Mulligan WCC's. The store is on Mass Ave, in Central Square, about 1/3 of the way to Harvard Square.

Ingrid Jensen was part of the best concert I have ever been a part of. She was the guest artist at my high school big band's end-of-the-year concert, at the Lincoln Theater on Miami Beach back in 1998. The charts she picked out were absolutely amazing: Maria Schneider's "Last Season," a big band arrangement of "Vernal Fields," Dave Holland's "The Oracle" (arranged by someone German, I think--I played electric piano), the Diva version of "Caravan," "My Ideal"...I think we may have played "Marsh Blues" from Vernal Fields as a combo, also. Everybody somehow rose to the occasion and managed to pull the charts off. I ran into her at a show at CBGB earlier this year with Joel Frahm...she's gotten married recently and seems like she's doing really well, playing with lots of up-and-coming people.

Yes, and this is a good example of the real problem: a person in authority (you) has implicitly told your students that it is OK to do this. The students shouldn’t have to buy copies, but the school district sure as hell should. Or maybe if the school district is poor, it can just copy it now and pay for it later when they have the money? It seems to me that the problem in general has progressively become worse over the last 20 years. And it will continue to get worse unless we all stop kidding ourselves by rationalizing this type of behavior. This seems problematic from a utilitarian perspective, though. To me, it's pretty obvious that the greater good is served best by just going ahead and copying, given these constraints. I'd much rather have kids learning literature than the alternative, even if it means that they have to take money out of some faraway rights-holder's pocket. To put it somewhat differently: it's one thing to argue, as Jim does above, that just because some people are richer doesn't mean that we all have the right to the same cars or stereos or whatever. But it's quite another to argue that because some people are richer means that there are circumstances under which we don't all have the right to the same quality of education.

http://www.garbagescout.com

Weird...my roommate seems to think that the Globe Jazz Festival is no more, but nobody knows what happened to it. There is Berkfest out in Western Mass., but that's more jam-bandy/granola-crunchy than a jazz festival.

HOLY SHIT, PHIL LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!!!! Clearly you guys don't have to ride the Green Line B branch on a routine basis. That train is still about 45 minutes away from reaching Phil. (Beantown in-joke: the Green Line, especially the B train, is agonizingly slow.)

And then there's the Bud Powell version, which is a whole 'nother story altogether. (Bud plays the first 8 bars relatively straight, then starts the blowing pretty much immediately.)

link to the full study Sample questions are in Appendix A.

I guess what I'm saying is, even for those who have developed it, discernment gets exhausting in this day and age. If I had to make transactions like that every day, I'd lose my friggin' mind. So the question becomes, do most people never learn discernment, or are plenty of them learning it but they're just too damn tired to want to use it?

On the other hand, I think there's a case to be made that life is getting more complex, too. There are more situations to negotiate every single day, and American business has made it its job to make things as complicated as possible so as to confuse people and extract maximum profit from them. Here a case in point I experienced a few weeks ago at Best Buy while shopping for a camera: I needed three things: a digital camera, a carrying case, and a memory card. Buying the case was fairly straightforward. The camera I ended up picking out was marked one price but there was an instant rebate marking it down to another. But the memory card, that's where things started getting weird. I needed at least a 256MB card. They were about $50. But the 512 MB cards were discounted from $65 to $35. So it was cheaper to buy 512 MB than 256 MB. I began to get suspicious of Best Buy's intentions. Was there a factory somewhere in Taiwan unloading shitty-ass, defective 512MB cards on the cheap? Did I mention that there were about 8 different kinds and 3 different brands of memory cards, not all of which were compatible with the model of camera I had bought? Things got really fun when I realized I needed a warranty, since my last camera crapped out on me after only a month. One-year or two-year? Hmmmm. So the warranty, it covers pretty much any kind of damage you can imagine, as long as the damage wasn't clearly the result of your own stupidity. You take the camera back in, you say it was damaged, boom, you get 100% of the price back in store credit for a different camera. Now, say I don't like the camera. I take it back to Best Buy within 30 days, I get my refund but get whacked with a 15% restocking fee. So if I take the camera back after a week, I lose 15% of my money, but if I keep it for 11 months, get good use out of it, and then intentionally break it, I can bring it back in, pretend it's the manufacturer's fault, and lose no money (although I guess it's not liquid, since I can only spend it at Best Buy). There's a mail-in rebate on the memory card, which I have to remember to send in if I want $10 back. And then, the piece de resistance: the rewards card! I pay $15 or whatever at the register, I get the Best Buy rewards card, which then takes more than $15 off my purchase. If I pay via cash, it's 10% off, but it's 12% off if I use the rewards card in conjunction with my credit card. So finally, I stagger home with my goods, plus a rebate form that I'll never remember to send in within the 30 days, plus another card to cram into my wallet and remember to use in a way that extracts maximum advantage of the terms and conditions. And that's just for one merchant. Is it really all that surprising that some people just give up on even the simpler tasks?

Off topic, but what happened to the little dot that appears on the envelope to denote topics that you've replied to? Seems like it just disappeared today, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.

Can't access Google or a lot of other sites right now...anyone else having problems?

Tonight's dinner: Tonjiru, which is miso soup with thinly sliced pork and burdock added, along with leek, potato, and carrot. Canteloupe as an appetizer and a Moretti Rosso to wash it all down.

What's the best way to clean the dust out of a laptop fan system? I don't want to blow all the dust back into the computer.

One time, I was on a Boeing 757 flight to DFW and when we came in, the pilot just floated the thing down onto the runway. It was so smooth, the whole plane broke out into applause. The flight attendant came on and said, "And after that beautiful landing by Captain Hornblower, welcome to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport." Damnest thing I ever saw. The pilot was out shaking everyone's hand as we left. I still don't know how he did it. I mean, it didn't even feel like the plane was slowing down, never mind touching down! It was a piece of work. Our landing wasn't bumpy or anything, just mind-blowingly fast. Actually, it turns out that Air Asia really approaches the runway at slower-than-normal speeds. The reason it feels so much faster is that they don't touch down until a much later point than usual, to save tires, and then they don't decelerate abruptly like most planes, which saves brakes.

Johor Bahru, Malaysia, to Jakarta, June 2004, on Air Asia.* The plane's only choice on ascent was to take off directly into a thunderstorm off Singapore. Early in the climb the plane plunged what felt like about 300 feet. People were freaking out for about 15 seconds, and the Malaysian kid next to me looked like he was about to have a heart attack. Upon arrival in Indonesia I got yelled at by some airport police after taking a detour looking for my buddy, who had arrived separately on a flight from KL about an hour before. Then the immigration officer was wearing a Yankees cap. Talk about a great first impression! *Interesting story about Air Asia: when we took them for the first time (Bangkok to Chiang Mai) my buddy turned to me on landing and said, "Was it just me, or was that the fastest fucking landing you have ever seen?" He looked terrified, but I was sitting in the aisle seat and hadn't been paying attention. On the way back, I had the window and was promptly scared shitless upon the landing, which I think was somewhere between Mach 4 and Warp 1.8. Only when we got back to the States a month later did we learn that one of the Air Asia CEO's much-touted cost-cutting methods was to save tens of thousands by instructing his pilots to wait until the very last instant on the runway before hitting the brakes...

Miami is kind of a cultural wasteland masquerading as a cosmopolitan city, to be brutally honest. Cuban cultural institutions: Versailles Restaurant (anyone know of any others that would qualify?) Others: Parrot Jungle (haven't seen the new location on Watson Island, though) Fairchild Tropical Garden (features a new installation of Dale Chihuly's weird glass sculptures, I was just there on Tuesday) Key Biscayne/Cape Florida Lighthouse Biscayne National Park/Elliott Key or Everglades National Park - but these are quite a hike from Broward County South Beach-->Lincoln Road Mall (check the Van Dyke Cafe website for jazz events) Wolfsonian Museum, Ziff Jewish Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami Vizcaya or the Deering Estate Downtown Coral Gables (Miracle Mile and around, Biltmore Hotel)

I'm trying to finally burn these files as a data CD using the WinXP wizard. It looks simple enough. But whenever I click "start writing these files to CD" after selecting that I want to burn a data CD, it gives me an error: "Cannot complete the CD Writing Wizard." I restarted IMAPI in "Services" and set it to Automatic, and still nothing. Is the problem that I don't have enough space on the C drive? I am trying to burn about 610 MB; Windows says the total free space on C: is 770 MB. Edit: so I install the newly-released trial version of Nero, and now WinXP burns fine. Bizarre....

I'd skip the fish but it's worth a try. Vodka would take the edge off. Maybe, but it could also just serve to prolong things. A hangover is basically alcohol withdrawal--adding alcohol to your system will just draw things out a bit.

Never tried it before, but I read somewhere that going for a nice long jog will do the trick. Every step will feel like your head is getting whacked with a sledgehammer but it's supposedly all over twice as fast.

Try here first: link

I already use EAC for the ripping (at somewhat less than CD quality), but I wasn't aware it could also do burning. Edit: does this work for data CDs as well as audio CDs?