Big Wheel

I actually emailed Jeff a while back when I discovered it but got no response. Guess he hasn't updated the JH discography in a while.

Some deservedly* obscure Joe Henderson is on the first track (Bessie's Blues) of this one from one of his students: http://fervidjazz.com/glen-simpson-live-cd.html . Found on Spotify. (*I say deservedly because while Joe of course plays great, this is very much a "semipro" record at best, and the drummer is particularly cringe-inducing.)

But leaving aside the obvious difference that most of the NBA games in 1962 were never even filmed, let alone given the media exposure or public attention of the 2012 NBA, even Wilt wasn't expected by anyone to do the kinds of stuff that's expected of Lebron. The onus to win a team game with individual effort is on Lebron in a way it never was on Wilt. That's all I'm saying. When people talk about why the Warriors couldn't beat the Celtics, nobody points their finger and says "Wilt couldn't get it done." The reverse is true for LeBron - rather than ask why no Heat role player could score consistently enough in the 2011 Finals to give LeBron some time to rest, instead the narrative is all about LeBron shrinking in the fourth quarter. Back then - and I was around - people did say, "Wilt couldn't get it done." There was always the comparison with Wilt and Bill Russell. Wilt got the numbers, but Russell got the championships. Similar to discussions today. Interesting. Today of course most of the discussion revolves around the Celtics having eight Hall of Famers during the stretch from 1960-62 (9 if you count Clyde Lovelette, 10 if you count Auerbach). The Warriors only had 3 (Chamberlain, Tom Gola, and Paul Arizin).

The rule is that you must let the shooter complete his shot. Any contact, even after the release, breaks the rule and is a shooting foul. For the same reason you are not allowed to impede the shooter's landing space a la Bruce Bowen. The shot is gone, the shooter falls on your leg and turns his ankle, that's a foul. Plenty of travels are called in the NBA. Illegal dribbles/palming you'll see every once in a while, but I think it's OK that this is rarely called because most palming occurs in situations where the spirit of the rule is not being violated. The idea is that the offensive player cannot palm the ball to get an unfair advantage over a defender who is in a position to make a steal. In the majority of cases in the NBA where the ball is palmed, the player (often a guard in the backcourt) is not being closely guarded by a defender, so the illegal dribble is totally inconsequential anyway - there's no unfair advantage being gained.

Bev and other UK members: is your memory of the quality of school cafeterias similar to MG's? In my US elementary school in the late 1980s the cafeteria food was almost uniformly awful. Even the less healthy food like pizza, which we looked forward to because it was a respite from everything else, was still pretty bad. I don't think there was a private company running the kitchen but I'm sure the cafeteria's budget for food procurement was next to nothing.

Nice to make your acquaintance, Larry. Let's hang out again soon! Love, The Year 2001 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us I did sort of feel the same way when I read the BBC article. In the US at least we like to stereotype school cafeteria workers as Dickensian harridans gleefully dishing out toxic sludge, but in truth it's extremely hard to run a institutional cafeteria with a limited budget and make the food non-disgusting. These people are doing the best they can with what they have to work with, and that their best isn't good enough doesn't mean they don't have feelings.

But leaving aside the obvious difference that most of the NBA games in 1962 were never even filmed, let alone given the media exposure or public attention of the 2012 NBA, even Wilt wasn't expected by anyone to do the kinds of stuff that's expected of Lebron. The onus to win a team game with individual effort is on Lebron in a way it never was on Wilt. That's all I'm saying. When people talk about why the Warriors couldn't beat the Celtics, nobody points their finger and says "Wilt couldn't get it done." The reverse is true for LeBron - rather than ask why no Heat role player could score consistently enough in the 2011 Finals to give LeBron some time to rest, instead the narrative is all about LeBron shrinking in the fourth quarter.

Look, I'm not saying Wilt wasn't an all-time great. He was. I'm saying that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison to expect that any player in the modern era could approach these numbers while playing the entire 48 minutes. The sheer level of defensive intensity and decreased focus on the post (thanks to rule changes and improved athleticism across the board) make it all but impossible. (Though I shudder to think of what Shaq could pull off with legalized offensive basket interference and a 12-foot lane.)

The game was completely different in 1962. Wilt was a 7-footer playing in a 9-team league full of shorter, less athletic guys. There was no defense to speak of and the Warriors averaged 125.4 ppg (with their opponents putting up 122.4 ppg). The three-point field goal wouldn't be adopted by the NBA for another 17 years, so the value of accurate deep jump shooting was much lower, meaning the game revolved around the low post. The lane was 4 feet narrower, allowing for easier camping down low with no need to worry about getting called for 3 seconds, and offensive goaltending was permitted - both rules that favored Wilt's style of play. If you're wondering why Wilt's FT% was as good as it was that year (61%), it's because at the time there was no rule against simply jumping toward the basket from the free throw line, making your free throws, in effect, uncontested running 5-footers off the glass. All these rules were changed to curb Wilt's dominance. Also this season was the one that featured Wilt's 100-point game and so forth, so the stats are skewed a bit by these outlier games. The Warriors' strategy was pretty clearly: 1) Get Wilt the ball as close to the basket as possible. 2) Nobody is tall enough or quick enough to stop Wilt once he gets the ball in the post, unless he is triple-teamed. 2a) If Wilt is tripled, he can kick out to anyone he wants for the easy mid-range jumper. While this strategy does require Wilt to do a fair bit of running up and down the court, it's not nearly as physically taxing as what James is expected to do against good defenses and it certainly doesn't make the same demands of Wilt on the other end. LeBron has to defend on the wing, chase point guards around, body up big men on the block, handle the pick and roll, and help out on other assignments where necessary. On defense, Wilt has to basically get under the rim and stay there, challenging any nearby shot, but it's not his job to worry about much else.

Ha ha. LeBron has been playing crazy numbers of minutes these playoffs. He played something like 45 minutes in Game 1. It is not realistic to expect him to put up 30-40 ppg, 10+ rbg, 5+ apg, defend every position on the court, run the break, play power forward for significant stints on offense AND still have enough left in the tank to take over the game in the fourth quarter while only sitting 3 minutes. Who in any sport ever has been held to this kind of standard?!

Wow, thanks, hadn't heard of that issue. Kind of shocked that Gail greenlighted that.

What are the odds that we'll actually see the original mix of Cruisin' With Ruben and The Jets rather than the horrendous 1980s mix with overdubbed bass and drums? Had Zappa already wrecked it before he issued it on Barking Pumpkin, or was that done for some later version? While this is far from Zappa's best or most original work, this is still his most inexplicable decision to me by far. It would be like if Shakespeare went back and, say, "fixed" The Merry Wives of Windsor by deciding that Falstaff definitely needed to be shadowed in every act by his doppelganger Fartstaff, Ye Olde Walking Fart Joke. As an aside, I happened to be on a road trip through the Southern California desert 3 years ago and had a chance to do a bit of poking around in Palmdale and Lancaster, where Zappa went to high school. The whole valley that contains both towns is one weird place, unadulterated desert (on multiple levels). Even in LA you sometimes get the sense that people were not meant to live in this area, but the feeling is about 10x as strong in the Antelope Valley. Today there are lots of random junkyards and stuff around; it's one of the places Hollywood stores its props for blockbusters and where retired airplanes go to die. In Frank's day it must have been almost 100% families affiliated in some way with Edwards Air Force Base, and until you got old enough to know someone with a car who could drive you over the mountains through Santa Clarita to LA, it must have felt like living on a different, barren planet.

Anyone familiar with this group? I've been listening to the record "Live 1974-75" on Spotify. On the one hand, they're shamelessly derivative in places (the cover of Stevie Wonder's "Living in the City" sounds like they tried to copy it note for note from Innervisions). On the other...these guys can really play. Few bands would have succeeded like they do at not making that cover sound like total schlock. And the version of Freedom Jazz Dance is excellent. Are their other records like this?

Perish the thought! Forgive me if I don't see a reason to bow extra deeply to the linguistic whims of people who invented a turn of phrase like "bio break".

Oh, you mean like my then 65-year old boss in 2005, who would often stride to my cubicle and proclaim "I want you to do a Google on colonoscopies for me"? (Yes, we were working on a project for a client who made colonoscopes.) At this point the only businesspeople that freak out about using company names as verbs or otherwise mangling them are the lawyers for those companies, as they're panicked about the resulting trademark dilution. (And why should we care what businesspeople think about the language anyway? We already let them police our pasts, decide what we can buy, decide what we can eat affordably, and exercise a de facto check on the government, now we're going to cede control over what comes out of our mouths to them too simply because OH GOD WE NEED THE MONIES?)

When you are an elite basketball player the risk of injury far, far outweighs the rewards of staying in college (which you may not want to be at in the first place) for four years. Not everyone is bright enough or lucky enough to be Tim Duncan. The money will not "always be there" for a guy who tears his ACL his junior year. That guy would have an extra $10 million in net worth or more had he spent those 3 years playing professionally. You know what will always be there for a player, provided he hasn't squandered all of that $10 million? College.

Ethan Iverson's comparisons of a bunch of solos on Lady Be Good is also an excellent jumping-off point for this kind of understanding: http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/2-oh-lady.html The problem of course is that this is really the only way to start analyzing things with any precision, but it's immediately opaque to the non-musician. Listening to the Konitz and Parker solos, one thing that occurs to me (which could be very wrong and a product of drinking too much caffeine on an empty stomach, but here goes nothing) is that bop almost was like taking the fundamentals of a Pres solo, emphasizing those fundamental notes by accenting them, and then filling up lots of the rests with unaccented notes in the scale. The result is that you have these multiple melodies going - the accents form a basic melody and then there are all these OTHER micromelodies playing off of that.

I am not a fan of Al Michaels for other reasons, but perhaps the reason he insists upon it is that he grew up in Brooklyn and that is how people who grew up in Brooklyn talk?

Larry, my apologies. My reply came out sounding significantly meaner than I intended it. Just thought there was an irony in grumpily policing threads for duplicates (they're timewasting!!) and then botching a copy-and-paste that led to me visiting an error page instead of the desired thread (timewasting!!).

Might be a good idea to make sure you haven't posted broken links before declaring threads CLOSED.

Regarding the above Van Gundy sequence, my sense is that one of the subjects that no basketball pundit wants to take an unconventional stance on is a sort of weird orthodoxy about low post play. Under this way of thinking, the NBA made a questionable decision in speeding up (read: wimpifying) the game by instituting defensive 3 seconds rules, cracking down on hand-checking, etc., allowing quicker small players to become ruthlessly effective as penetrators, so the only "fair" way to compensate for this is to allow big men on both sides of the ball to get away with anything and everything in the paint short of obvious flagrants in the name of "tough physical low-post battle". When was the last time you heard a commentator call a player out for playing over-aggressively on the block?

Agreed. What I don't understand is that James was in a virtually identical situation in OT, locked arm-in-arm with his man, and instead the refs call it on James and he fouls out of the game. It's hard not to come out of game 4 feeling very pessimistic about Dwyane Wade, like he's turning into a younger version of Kobe Bryant. The final fallaway 3 should have never been taken - the play appears to have been drawn up as an open look for Mario Chalmers, yet Wade deliberately dribbled in a way that made it impossible for him to pass to Chalmers during the brief moment he was open, then heaved a terrible off-balance 3 at the buzzer.

I'd make sure that the first letter of your username/password isn't getting capitalized. I know some elements of Android apps automatically capitalize the first letter when you enter data; if the browser in your Kindle is doing that for password boxes it could be capitalizing the password.

Another crazy night as Rajon Rondo puts up an absolutely insane 44/8/10 while playing all 53 minutes, maybe the best game of his career, but the Celts still lose in OT. As for the officiating...I thought there were a few questionable no-calls but it wasn't as bad as some are saying. The one where Wade brushed Rondo's face was a missed call but it certainly wasn't a hard shot like some have been saying - looked like the bottom of his hand just grazed him. The Celts came into the game determined not to let Wade and James score in the paint but this often meant committing lots of fouls on the drivers, so I don't see how the foul disparity that lots of people have been yelling about is inherently unfair.

Jim's posts in this thread are one of the best things I've read on this board. I can't tell you have many teachers I've had (and I don't think it's a coincidence that they were generally white dudes who came out of a time and place that made them idolize Prez's post-bebop acolytes, chiefly Getz and Konitz) who said in the middle of rehearsals, "no, no. Focus on making a melody! It's all about the melody!" At which point I usually gave them a blank stare because I was wrestling with the exact problem Jim discusses here - how did the lines I was playing not qualify as a melody? What they should have said was "The melodies you're playing could be much more interesting. Here's some ways you could improve them."