Dan Gould

Not Rita Rudner. Big Wheel nailed it, thanks. Perfect example of her style: "I like a man who cries…when I hit him."

No, that's not her.

Rooster, there's no way that restoring John Gilmore solos makes this CD a bigger seller. Its put out because its Blakey, and because its Morgan. Personally, I like this album more than a lot of people seem to, but then again, I was once known as Mogie Man.

Well, any list that starts with Gallagher is suspect right off the bat. There's one female standup I used to see on VH1 (I think)-thirty something, Jewish woman, very funny IMO, her schtick consists of straightforward narrative lines, punctuated and undermined by hysterical, under the breath asides. Anyone else see this lady? Definitely funnier than Roseanne!

Braden also has solid recordings on Criss Cross and Doubletime. He was also on RCA for several releases, and his Organic, if I recall correctly, also had Fathead on it. In fact, I think there's a Fathead tune on Organic which Fathead recorded for this new CD.

And continued today: Schilling, 6 1/3, one run allowed. A-Rod: another oh-fer day. Lowe goes tomorrow against Contreras, who hasn't pitched too well against the Sox. Dare I hope for a chance to sweep on Patriot's Day? (Thanks for the link, David)

Yes, it is shorthand for placing emphasis on a particular word. I use it regularly in e-mail when you don't have any easy way to add italics or bold. Here, when bold or italics is easy to add, it shouldn't be used, though sometimes I'll do it when I'm trying to fire off a quick post and sometimes don't take the time to add the code. And speaking of code, I notice a diference in how the board works depending on whether I am using Netscape (home) or IE (work). On one, clicking on the B above the text box launches a window in which I have to fill in the text I want bolded. In the other browser, clicking on the B simply adds the bold code to the text box, and I click on the B again to turn the bold off, like a toggle. I definitely prefer the latter.

Do our D.C. members know if Buck Hill is still active? I'm curious because I found a cut-out copy of his final Muse CD, and since it was sealed and $5, I decided to go for it: I think that when this first came out, in 1995, I stayed away because he played clarinet on four or five tracks, and that made me hesitate. Stupid, STUPID me!! This is an outstanding album, and the clarinet tracks are among the highlights, especially his cover of "Now's The Time". Buck Hill is Da Bumb!

For Easter, I got a gift card to Borders, and walked out with: Song For the New Man Fathead (tenor on all tunes except one) John Hicks Curtis Fuller John Menegon Jimmy Cobb As with Houston Person and Teddy Edwards, High Note is doing a great job documenting the later, more-brilliant-with-each-passing year phase of the great Fathead's career. Beautiful ballad playing (Time after Time and When I Fall in Love), choice hard bop cover (This I Dig of You), a nice tribute to his former boss, Herbie Mann, and other solid originals. Even Curtis Fuller sounds good-to my ears, he's going for fewer notes these days, but this day was definitely a good one for him. Buy this album!!!

I was stunned when it came down to the two Johns last night. The Idol who at least was born for these times got axed. We can only hope the other twit gets it next time.

Not embraced? I hear plenty of melisma on that show, maybe not as much as Mariah and Christina but still ...

Speaking of Simon, interesting piece about him: American Idol Chatter Why doesn't Simon Cowell understand his own show? By Matt Feeney Posted Tuesday, March 30, 2004, at 4:29 PM PT Cowell: Oscar Wilde he is not When you look at American Idol's Simon Cowell, his buff plumpness packed into his fancy T-shirts, you might find another figure coming strangely to mind—William Shatner. More specifically, you might be reminded of the original Star Trek Shatner, who, even in early middle age, had to be girdled into his Enterprise stretch-wear. Both Shatner and Cowell are known for their histrionics: Shatner as Kirk looking into the alien heavens and tossing his head from side to side in B-movie despair; Cowell massaging his temples or rubbing his eyes in a hammy semblance of aesthetic displeasure. It took Shatner maybe 15 years before he began trading on his kitsch legacy by giving Kirkified poetry readings in cafes and punk clubs. So, with allowances for our tightening cycle of nostalgia and self-reference, we might give Cowell half a decade or so before he gets in on the joke that he is. Like Anne Robinson of The Weakest Link before him, Cowell has benefited from the weird TV conceit that, perhaps out of some sense of our own cultural inferiority, Americans should enjoy seeing other Americans derided by sarcastic Brits. And yet an indispensable part of the American Idol experience is watching the imperious Simon flounder in his own show. In the competition's early rounds, the bizarre comedy of the flamboyantly "bad" singers sails far over his head. He's like a figure-skating judge bitchily scribbling down low scores without looking up to realize he's at Wrestlemania. But more interesting are the later rounds, in which Simon tries to impose his own rigid ideal of Idolness—a dull combination of capable singing and synthetic sexiness—on the voting audience. And the audience, animated by its own far-from-elevated biases, rejects it. One vivid sign of Cowell's floundering: His famous putdowns, which—despite the stagy malice of the intent behind them—are toothless, indeed witless, in their execution. They are, in fact, more consistently cringe-worthy than the singing that provokes them. Cowell, who comes third in the line of judges, has even more time to hone the gist and syntax of his insults and these are what he comes up with: "It was like The Exorcist." "If your lifeguard duties were as good as your singing, a lot of people would be drowning." "You had about as much passion as a kitten mewing." "You sang like someone who sings on a cruise ship. Halfway through I imagined the ship sinking." "I think you're amazing ... amazingly dreadful." "That was extraordinary. Unfortunately, it was extraordinarily bad." It's one thing, and a fairly benign thing at that, to venture a croaking imitation of Luther Vandross or Celine Dion. It's another thing to present yourself as the next great wit-misanthrope, a combination of Oscar Wilde and H.L. Mencken, when your verbal dexterity is more akin to that of Regis Philbin. Simon's odd belief that he's a wit isn't the only fascinating bit of cognitive dissonance on display on American Idol. Another is that, on a show in which three judges purport to be tastemakers, nobody—neither singers nor judges—has any taste. It's not just that the judges are playing at being profit-conscious record execs, suppressing their own quirky predilections for the sake of the bottom line. Neither Randy nor Paula nor Simon even seems capable of a real aesthetic misgiving. Just once I'd like to hear a judge say, "You know, your singing was pretty good there, but that song, 'I Believe I Can Fly,' I hate that song. Points off for choosing an insipid song." When the biggest hits from the last year were OutKast's "Hey Ya" and Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love," it's bizarre to pretend that pop success has everything to do with competent singing and nothing to do with the quality of the songs. On Idol, the fixation on singing is itself so reductive it verges on, if not mechanics, then athletics. The judges occasionally feign an interest in style, but when it comes down to it, they want belters—contestants adept at loud, clear, identifiably melodic yelling, with vibrato if possible. Simon also clearly has Spice Girls on the brain. That is to say, none of the judges is what you would call not shallow, but Simon is the one most likely to size up a contestant who has just performed in satisfactory compliance with American Idol vocal standards and say, "You just don't look like the American Idol." Simon has forgotten, apparently, that last year's American Idol finalists, Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard, didn't look much like the American Idol, either. Or, anyway, he's unwilling to accept that this was no accident. That's because, no matter how reductive his, and the other judges', pop aesthetic is, it isn't reductive enough. The voting audience is animated by something even more elemental, more reptilian-brained. Watching the later rounds of American Idol instills in the viewer a subtle but potent type of fear—empathy-fear, stage-fright-by-proxy. You can't help identifying with contestants you've seen over several weeks, whose life stories you keep hearing in ever-greater detail, whose stunned parents and disoriented younger siblings you've seen sitting in the waiting room and absorbing the judges' criticisms with visible winces. And, when the contestants hoist the mic to their faces and begin squawking the opening lines of their song (even the good ones start off badly), you can't help identifying with them even more—especially the ones you already kind of identify with. That's why, despite Simon's preference for contestants who "look like the American Idol," the audience continues to impose its preference for contestants who look like America. At the end of one semifinal round, all three judges lathered heavy, insistent praise on La Toya London, an attractive-by-numbers belter from Oakland, and Leah LaBelle, a pretty redhead with an able voice and a model's body who defected to the United States from Bulgaria with her musician parents when she was a child. "You are a star," Simon cooed to Leah. The voting audience went along with the judges on La Toya, but they shoved the lithe, stage-named Leah aside in favor of Amy Adams, a plain, wan, country-voiced beautician from Bakersfield who, as Simon had pointedly observed, does not look like the American Idol. The thing is, Amy Adams may not look like the American Idol, but she does look like a demographically meaningful slice of America (or at least, with her beautician's dye job, like someone who does her hair). And, leaving aside Leah LaBelle's other alienating features, like the émigré stage parents and the porn-star name, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more resonant analogue for "foreigner," for the telephone-voting American public, than "Bulgarian." In the end, the smart money might still be on Diana DeGarmo, even though she was a candidate for elimination last week. (I'm guessing this was because she sang first on a marathon show, and since voters can't dial in until the show is over, they had forgotten her.) She's an irrepressible combination of Shakira and Shirley Temple from the town with the Dr. Seussian name—Snellville, Ga. With her Anglo-Latin ethnic vagueness, her perky Georgia drawl, and her megaphonic vocal style, she has all the bases covered. But don't be surprised if, advancing far into the competition with her, is John Stevens. Stevens is a redheaded kid who, with the innocent squinch of his pale face and his preference for Sinatra, appears to have time-traveled to his Idol audition from 1954. He's inspired a passionate following despite the fact that he can't, actually … what's the word I'm looking for? … sing. Indeed, his thin crooning relies on his retro appearance and his swingin' moves to maintain the pretense that he's singing and not just talking funny. After a semifinal round a few weeks ago, when it was Simon's turn to guess the audience's three finalist selections, he offered his two favorites (La Toya London and Leah LaBelle) and then, after a bitter pause, added John Stevens to his list. His spite was audible, but he guessed right. A week later, to the astonishment and outrage of Randy, he actually complimented Stevens after a comically undersung version of "Lately." "This guy," Simon said, "is Middle America." These were moments of insight, however grudging, into the real cues that guide Idol voting. It'll probably take a little longer—maybe a half decade or so—before Simon has an equally unpleasant moment of insight about his own hambone persona.

True, but the votes for the latter two options are implicitly supportive of "no", so the vote might be fairly considered not quite a tie as it technically is.

Now why didja have to go and ruin the surprise?

Thanks, Claude. Jim, I would not worry about this too much.

So where was this posted, Jim?

I think people should lighten up. And be reminded that the board allows you to supress signatures and avatars so if you are afraid of being offended, go into your controls and make the necessary changes. Maybe Jim should add that to the registration e-mail, so the soon-to-arrive diversity doesn't go screaming away.

You can tell the difference between good and bad remasterings with all that noise???? Do you A/B your discs in the car or on your main stereo? Sorry Paul, but all I can say to that is

Excuse me? Is there a missing smilie here or am I getting a rash of shit for no particular reason?

Someone, anyone explain to me why Freaking Quentin Tarrantino, that smarmy full of himself hack, is on the judging panel tonight? Someone tell me tomorrow what happened, normally, the atrocious singing would send me away, tonight its a man who should be returned to that video store posthaste. End of rant.

The reference is to Airplane!

Assuming there was some tax liability, getting a refund only signifies that you overpaid in witholding. The question is asking what your taxes were.

In my current job, my listening only becomes restricted when I am doing careful audio editing, and I have to concentrate. Not only does it not bother the boss, but she even returned from Brazil with a Brazilian jazz CD for me. And on top of that, I am now near the end of my second go-round through the 2500 CD collection. In fact, in order to spread things out this time, I think I will drop the picking and choosing and just go from A-Z. At ten CDs per day, that's 50 a week or about 50 weeks. Who said collections get so big you can't listen to it all?

Couldn't resist after Sangrey's Have You Ever Seen a Big Band thread.

Thanks for the info, EasyRider, er, Mark! Glad I'm not in the market for Think Different posters! Pathetic that this guy invents things like that. But he might get caught by careful readers-does Paypal ajudicate a dispute in less than 30 days? I can't imagine that they do such a thing so quickly-especially since they are now owned by Ebay and Ebay makes you wait quite a while before posting a non-paying bidder alert, for example. So anyone who reads his claim that "Paypal ruled in my favor" might realize that this isn't even possible in the time frame given. I would go really hard against Paypal to get this charge reversed. Another reason to use credit cards rather than checking accounts with Paypal-you can take it up with your card issuer, too.