Big Wheel

I'm not opposed to all stereotyping, just the wrong kind of stereotyping. I think we all know it when we see it: "Jews are all greedy, Poles are all stupid, Mexicans are all lazy." Generally, greed, stupidity, and laziness are frowned upon in our culture. The gaydar thing is only wrong to a person who already thinks there's something wrong with being gay. One might make the argument that it's making fun of gay people for having meticulously kept and preciously decorated houses, but I think most people wouldn't say there's anything really wrong with such decorating--it's just not how they, personally, would choose to decorate their own houses.

Am I the only one who thinks that sounds a lot less like Pops and a lot more like a cross between Grover and the Cookie Monster?

I have no idea why, but my work's web filter (WebSense) blocks bagatellen. I can only guess that it thinks the words "bag a ...." in a URL have a sexual connotation.

It's going great...in fact, for extra credit, I just asked the gay secretary who works next to me what he thinks. The verdict: not pejorative, gay people use it amongst themselves all the time, and have no problem when straight people use it. p.s.: Anyone here want to take bets on whether Weizen or The Groper can ever respond to me without making mention of the fact that I live in Cambridge?

"Gaydar" is not a pejorative term--you can think someone might be homosexual without making a value judgment on homosexuality. Using "gay" to describe someone or something that you detest is.

Since a fair amount of the Red Line of the Boston T is underground, most cell phones don't work on it. (I have T-Mobile, and do get a signal in a couple of downtown stations because they installed an antenna down there.) But most of my commute is cellphone-free.

Don't have one, don't plan on getting one for a good long while if I'm going to stay in Boston. Outside of New York, it's probably the easiest city in the U.S. to survive without one. Very good public transportation network, commuter rail links should you ever want to go to the outlying suburbs, and the $9/hr ZipCar for short trips to the more inaccessible parts of the city (or if you need to haul a lot of stuff somewhere). Plus, my job subsidizes my monthly train pass, making it cost-free to ride the T whenever I want.

Truth be told, the rest of it doesn't sound THAT screwed up to me. Certainly not very sophisticated, but...I can at least almost HEAR the tunes when the trumpet player is playing.

I'm checking out the samples on cduniverse right now. It's....um. Jim's review is fairly accurate. I think the trombone player (at least, I think that's a trombone, though it sounds a little like a buzzsaw) only learned how to play one note. At the time of this recording he was evidently still working on getting that one in tune... edit: Please tell me that's at least a trombone and not a tenor saxophone. Please. I'm starting to lean toward it being a bass washboard.

Or Santa Cruz.

No, a sniper determines his max bid just as a proxy bidder does. If you decided to bid $10000 on a copy of Kind of Blue, the sniping software will not outbid you unless the sniper has told it that he is willing to pay $10001 for the item. This means that all you have to do to win the auction is what you always do--make a bid that you think nobody will beat. All this suggests is that your information on the market for the item isn't as perfect as you'd like it to be. Instead of looking at the prices bid in the current auction, you need to look at the price the same item has sold for in past auctions.

BTW, I think Spontaneous Meat Generation would be a really good name for a band. Some more thoughts: If I was a disgruntled neighbor wanting to do something nasty to your pets, I probably wouldn't bother putting the meat in a straight line. Even if the fence barred my entry onto your property, I'd probably just chuck the meat into your yard, over the fence, rather than meticulously place it along the fence line. As Rod noted, meat in a line would be a dead giveaway. Also, I would use chicken or tuna fish, not beef. A pound of cubed beef costs probably two or three times the equivalent amount of chicken. But maybe your neighbor is just dumber or more wasteful than I am. On second thought, I think I'd be more likely to use beef if I wanted to hurt your dog, tuna if I wanted to do something to your cat. I've never seen a house cat eat beef, though I don't see an obvious reason why they wouldn't. Does your dog bark a lot, and do you leave it outside when you're gone? That would seem to me to be the most obvious reason for some asshole wanting to do this. A friend of my family is a paramedic who once lived next door to a woman with an incessantly yapping dog that she always put outside when she left. Only after REPEATED requests for her to take her dog inside were met with the denial that the dog was ever noisy did our friend decide to take matters into his own hands. Whenever the dog was howling enough to drive a person crazy, he would take some ground beef and conceal one of his paramedic's Benadryl pills in it, then toss it over the fence. The dog would be knocked out like a light. He claimed it never caused lasting harm to the animal, and that it eventually came to eagerly expect these little meat+sedative treats.

Do your neighbors have small children? Perhaps someone was grilling, left the meat unattended, and the kids decided to have some fun playing with the squishy building blocks that Dad left on the table...stupid, I know, but seems as good a guess as any! The fact that the meat was placed sometime around dinnertime seems to suggest that it was originally intended to be eaten. Was the weather nice enough to grill outside this evening?

There are the outdoor recordings on disc one of the Atlantic New Orleans Mosaic box, but these feature large groups, not a solo sax player.

I also love this tune...it's put together so nicely. Especially the way in which the bridge has that sort of gospel sound in it around bars 5 and 6.

I'm going to guess that the Zappa tune is Zoot Allures (only because I've heard a previous organ rendition of it with Dr. Lonnie Smith).

Saturday there were key limes at the Haymarket. Sunday's project: Key Lime Pie! Made from the recipe on the bag of limes--not my mom's and the "traditional" recipe, which are uncooked: 1 bag key limes-->1/2 cup juice 1 14 oz can condensed milk 4 egg yolks Graham cracker crust--store bought (someday I will bother to make my own) Combine first three ingredients to make filling. Pour into crust and bake ~15 minutes on 350 degrees. Refrigerate until serving. Topped with real whipped cream and little slices of key lime for decoration.

I doubt it. If we are, it's the whole router, as all 4 of the people in my apartment are having problems. Plus I use ZoneAlarm, which is usually pretty good about blocking such incursions.

Right now I'm having problems with everything BUT Organissimo and Google. No idea why.

Perfect. That was exactly what I had guessed. As for the encoding, I'm using LAME with Daniel A's "-mm -b 80" switch. I believe this takes care of all the bitrate issues.

I'm currently putting this box on my mp3 player and, to save space, am encoding all the mono sessions in mono. When do the stereo sessions begin? And are the live dates at the Plaza and Newport in stereo?

This thread inspired me to pick up some tilapia filets on my weekly pilgrimage to the Boston Haymarket today. Baked them after marinating in something close to Brandon's lime-olive oil marinade--only I used lemons. Since I had 3/4 of a lemon left over and was still hungry, made some pasta and dumped a little olive oil, garlic, capers, romano cheese, and lemon juice over it. Good stuff.

Welcome!

Simpler is often better with fish. The mackerel I made a while back had like 3 steps: 1. Season fish with salt. 2. Jam lemon and fresh oregano inside cavity and tie it all up with string. 3. Toss on cookie sheet and throw in oven. Delicious with a sauce made from mixed olive oil and fresh lemon juice.