GA Russell

Yes I did, CW. My choice was between Windows XP & Vista, Mac OSX and Linux. So I downloaded the Windows XP version, and it's not working. That's why I thought that the problem might be caused by my using Windows 2000.

Thanks, Peter! This is my first time trying to download from Amazon, and I'm having trouble. Perhaps it is because the Amazon download file is for Windows XP or Vista, and I use Windows 2000. Any ideas?

fasstrack, my first thought is that the situation may have been generational as well as racial. In the 90s I visited the downtown Atlanta library religiously once every two or three weeks to read the seven (!) Canadian newspapers they subscribed to to catch up on the Canadian league games. Between the staff and the patrons, I dealt with people of every sort (including winos). I found that the most charming and gracious people were consistently the middle age and older black women, and the rude and chip-on-the-shoulder types were always the young (early 20s) black women. I remember thinking to myself, I'm glad I'm not a young black man in the market for a wife, because those guys have nothing but bitches to choose from. So now it is ten years later, and those young black women are now in their 30s with children, and apparently are rude to cab drivers. It's not just racial, because I'm sure that the gracious black ladies I met were the victims of discrimination too. That's why I suspect it's generational.

Happy Birthday Bluerein!

Dan Ralph says here that Edmonton has clinched a playoff spot. http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/New...7079996-cp.html Calgary is in first place in the West at 10-5, and the other three teams are tied at 9-6.

Happy Birthday John! My birthday is often an Election Day, and now this year yours is too!

Two boring games today. Oh well, they can't all be good. Montreal Alouettes 42....Hamilton Tiger-Cats 11 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...ory/GlobeSports http://www.sportsnetwork.com/merge/tsnform...aspx?id=4185073 It took the Als a quarter to get it in gear, but after that it was no contest. The loss mathematically eliminated the Ticats from the playoffs for the fourth consecutive year. ***** Calgary Stampeders 42....Saskatchewan Roughriders 5 http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home http://64.246.64.33/merge/tsnform.aspx?c=s...aspx?id=4185110 Really grim. Henry Burris was on his game today, while Michael Bishop stunk the joint out.

RIP. I have one of his albums, music from the Batman tv show. I also have a Best of compilation of Basie's Roulette recordings. I'll pull them out tonight.

From the LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-...,0,166844.story William Claxton dies at 80; photographer helped make Chet Baker famous Email Picture Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times "I didn't want to stage my pictures," noted jazz photographer William Claxton once said. He died Saturday at age 80 of complications from congestive heart failure, according to his wife of 49 years, Peggy Moffitt Claxton. By Jon Thurber, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer October 13, 2008 William Claxton, the master photographer whose images of Chet Baker helped fuel the jazz trumpeter's stardom in the 1950s and whose fashion photographs of his wife modeling a topless swim suit were groundbreaking years later, has died. He was 80. Claxton died from complications of congestive heart failure Saturday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his wife, actress and model Peggy Moffitt Claxton, told The Times. Photos: William Claxton's... In a career spanning more than a half century, Claxton also became well known for his work with celebrities including Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen, who became a close personal friend; but he gained his foremost public recognition for his photographs of jazz performers including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Mel Torme, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Stan Getz. But it was his photographs of Baker that helped teach him the true meaning of the word photogenic. "I was up all night developing when the face appeared in the developing tray," Claxton told the Irish Times in 2005. "A tough demeanor and a good physique but an angelic face with pale white skin and, the craziest thing, one tooth missing -- he'd been in a fight. I thought, my God, that's Chet Baker." Claxton observed that over the years he had taken photographs of some ordinary-looking guys whose faces would just pop out on film. He said that's what Baker had. His 1951 photograph of Baker started a relationship that continued for the next five or six years as he chronicled Baker's rise to fame as one of the most visible jazz performers of the decade. Claxton called photography "jazz for the eyes" and tried to capture the often dynamic tension between the artist, the instrument and the music. "For the photographer, the camera is like a jazz musician's ax. It's the tool that you would like to be able to ignore, but you have to have it to convey your thoughts and whatever you want to express through it," Claxton told jazz writer Don Heckman some years ago. Almost as much as the recordings themselves, the photographs reach into the essence of making music. "That's where jazz and photography have always come together for me," Claxton told Heckman. "They're alike in their improvisation and their spontaneousness. They happen at the same moment that you're hearing something and you're seeing something, and you record it and it's frozen forever." Born in Pasadena on Oct. 12, 1927, Claxton grew up in an upper middle-class family in La Cañada Flintridge. His mother was a musician and his older brother played piano; Claxton said he tried the keyboard but had no patience for it. He started collecting records, especially jazz, at an early age. At 2 years old, he was taking the bus to downtown Los Angeles to hear jazz greats, including Ellington, at the Orpheum Theatre. Years later, he would go to jazz clubs and shoot photographs of up-and-coming musicians just for fun and to listen to the music. An incident that he recounted in the introduction to his book "Jazz: William Claxton" speaks of a more innocent time between celebrities and photographers. Claxton recalled taking his old 4-by-5 Speed Graphic to photograph the legendary saxophonist Parker at the Tiffany Club on 7th Street in downtown L.A. He hung out with Parker until the place closed and then took him and some of his young fans to his parents' home in La Cañada Flintridge, where he improvised a studio in his bedroom and posed Parker with his fans in a formal portrait. He said that he had never seen Bird, whose life was cut short by drug problems, look happier. Claxton started at UCLA but gave up college when Richard Bock, who was starting Pacific Jazz Records, hired him as a photographer. He created a vast array of memorable album covers for the label. Toward the end of the 1950s, he started moving into fashion work. He married Moffitt, who was the muse of fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. In the early 1960s, they created the photographs of the topless bathing suit designed by Gernreich with Moffitt as the model. "That was a big family decision," Claxton told Heckman. "Whew. Was I going to let my wife show her breasts in public? We hassled about it for a long time. Finally, we decided to employ nepotism. Only I could photograph it, we would have control of the pictures and Peggy would never model the suit in public. And it worked out OK. The pictures were tasteful, I thought, Peggy looked great, and it was historically a breakthrough for women, that they could feel free enough to show the beauty of their breasts." Claxton also directed the film "Basic-Black," which is viewed by many as the first fashion video and is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While taking assignments for Life magazine, he photographed Sinatra at a recording session at Capitol Records, Barbra Streisand in New York, and McQueen. All were notoriously tough assignments, stars distrustful of the media and reluctant to be photographed. But he gained their trust and developed a friendship with McQueen through their common love of sports cars, race cars and motorcycles. His work is collected in an array of spectacular books, including "Jazz: William Claxton," "Young Chet," "Claxography," "Steve McQueen" and "Jazzlife." Claxton is survived by his wife of 49 years; his son Christopher; sister Colleen Lewis of Eagle Rock; and several nieces and nephews.

I listened to this just the other day. Evans recorded it on Disc One of his Complete Village Vanguard 1961 box.

RIP. A few years ago I had a daily calendar of his photographs of jazz musicians. Some of them I pulled out and inserted in the jewel cases of the artists. Just now I have been playing Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil, into which I slipped a photo of Wayne from 1996.

For the 1960 and '61 football seasons, my family lived in Seattle. NBC carried the Baltimore Colts games (with Chuck Thompson announcing) and the Pittsburgh Steelers games (with Lyndsay Nelson). They started at 10:30 am pacific time. CBS carried the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers games, which of course were in the afternoon. Gil Stratton announced those. The NBC games were always good. The CBS games were always boring. I never blamed Stratton for that. The 49ers and the Rams were both pretty bad in those days. But the CBS games were so often boring (and in those days as a kid I would watch just about anything!) that in '61 I tried the ABC broadcasts of the San Diego Chargers with Charlie Jones announcing. Those Charger games were great, and I quickly became an AFL fan for the duration. Stratton was also a radio actor in the 50s, known as Gil Stratton, Jr. I never knew who Gil Stratton, Sr. was. I heard him often when listening to radio shows was a hobby of mine. You will notice that the obit says that Stratton was also a Coast league umpire in the 50s. I never knew that! Excerpted from the LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-...0,7894390.story Gil Stratton, 86, a Southern California sportscasting fixture File photo In addition to sportscasting, Stratton's career included a stint in the Army Air Forces as well as acting roles. He appeared in the film "Girl Crazy" with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, singing "Embraceable You" in duet with Garland. The voice of the Rams and TV and radio anchor who said, 'I call 'em as I see 'em,' dies at home in Toluca Lake. 1:09 PM PDT, October 12, 2008 Gil Stratton, a longtime presence in Southern California sportscasting as the voice of the Rams, as the host of horse racing from Santa Anita and as an anchor on Channel 2 news and KNX 1070 Newsradio, died Saturday of congestive heart failure at this home in Toluca Lake, according to his wife Dee. He was 86. A former Pacific Coast League umpire, Stratton's signature line, "I call 'em as I see 'em," became familiar to generations of Southern Californians during his 17-year tenure on "The Big News," the trailblazing KNXT, now KCBS, broadcast in the mid-1960s that also featured Clete Roberts, Jerry Dunphy, Ralph Story and Bill Keene. In his sportscasting career, he covered the Summer Olympics from Rome in the 1960s, hosted the feature horse race on Saturdays from Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar, and worked as an announcer for the Rams, when they played in the Memorial Colisieum. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Stratton was born June 2, 1922. He attended Poly Prep in Brooklyn and earned his bachelor's degree from St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. He started his acting career as a teenager and, at the age of 19, appeared on Broadway in the George Abbot production "Best Foot Forward" and also worked as a radio actor. Two years later, he appeared in the film "Girl Crazy" with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, singing "Embraceable You" in duet with Garland. Stratton joined the Army Air Forces during World War II, being inducted on stage in Chicago after a performance of "Best Foot Forward," and was trained at the gunnery school in Las Vegas. But he spent much of his time umpiring service ball, a skill he had picked up while going to college. Years later, he would remember calling Joe DiMaggio out on a third strike at a game in Westwood and having the Yankee Clipper remark to him, "It was a little low, wasn't it son?" After the war, he settled in Southern California and picked up his acting career, appearing in films including "Stalag 17" with William Holden, "The Wild One," which starred Marlon Brando, and "Monkey Business," with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Charles Coburn. He also did a wide variety of classic radio broadcasts, and when he wasn't working behind the mike or the camera, he made a living, often behind the plate, as an umpire for Pacific Coast League games for nine years in the 1950s.

Happy Birthday T.D.!

I've been doing some Wikipedia searching tonight. Mike Longo is a pianist who was Dizzy Gillespie's musical director. He also operates a small label called CAP - Consolidated Artists Productions. CAP Records has released all four albums by pianist Jay D'Amico. From 1984 through September 10, 2001, D'Amico was the "pianist in residence" at Windows on the World, which was a restaurant and bar at the top of the World Trade Center's North Tower (which was destroyed September 11th). (In 2000, Windows on the World reported revenues of $37 million, making it the highest grossing restaurant in the US.) More recntly, D'Amico went on vacation to Tuscany, and while there composeed the eleven songs on his new album Tuscan Prelude. This is a trio album, with Marc Johnson on bass and Ronnie Zito on drums. Johnson and Zito provide quiet support. Most of D'Amico's compositions here have melodies that someone could write lyrics to, although not melodies of the sort Jon Hendricks would work on. There is a classical influence to his playing. I think it would be fair to call this contemporary third stream, but more jazzy than the ECM third stream records I have been listening to lately. To compare apples to apples, I would like to hear D'Amico do an album of standards, so that I would see how he matches up with Bill Charlap. I think that I would like D'Amico better. I like Tuscan Prelude a lot; but now that I have it, I wouldn't want another just like it. D'Amico is a much better pianist than composer. I can understand why he was selected by a restaurant which could afford anyone in New York they wanted.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers 25....Toronto Argonauts 16 http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home http://www.sportsnetwork.com/merge/tsnform...aspx?id=4184594 Good game between two bad teams. See-saw battle with poor play until the Bombers got their act together in the last two minutes to put the game away. The Bombers' magic number is now one. ***** Edmonton Eskimos 27....British Columbia Lions 20 http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home This was an interesting game because the Lions had won five straight and were playing at home, yet the Eskimos dominated throughout. Edmonton had a big second quarter, and led handily after that. With the score 27-10 fairly late in the game, BC scored ten points, the last three on a FG in the last minute to close the point differential in case a tie breaker is needed for the standings.

Just a guess, Bill!

Bill Clinton?

Fred Williams Week 16 preview http://www.sportsnetwork.com/merge/tsnform...aspx?id=4184477 Two games tonight, and two on Monday. Our Columbus Day is their Thanksgiving Day. This is it for the Argos.

David Naylor Week 16 preview http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...ory/GlobeSports

Here's an article about a woman who claims that she is Elvis's half-sister, and that she has a recently mailed letter from him, and that the DNA from his licking to seal the envelope will prove that he is alive. So the probate judge is examining, without ruling on the truth of her claims. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,434821,00.html

Anybody else remember The Lloyd Thaxton Show? It was an American Bandstand type show syndicated weekdays for the after-school hours, after Dick Clark reduced his schedule to Saturdays only. I saw it very few times, but I remember seeing The Tijuana Brass, The Turtles and Bobby "Boris" Pickett on it. From the LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-...0,2214593.story Lloyd Thaxton, the host of a popular Los Angeles TV dance show in the 1960s who memorably injected a visual zaniness into his daily rock 'n' roll party for teenagers, died Sunday. He was 81. Thaxton, who later became the Emmy Award-winning producer and director of TV's long-running consumer advocacy program "Fight Back! With David Horowitz," died of multiple myeloma at his home in Studio City, said his wife, Barbara. He had been diagnosed with the disease in May. Photos: Lloyd Thaxton | 1927 - 2008 Tribute post on comedy writer's blog A television personality from Toledo, Ohio, who arrived in Hollywood in 1957, Thaxton launched "Lloyd Thaxton's Record Shop" on KCOP-TV Channel 13 in 1959. The show featured records, guest stars and Thaxton's flair for humor. Revamped and renamed "Thaxton's Hop" in 1962, the live, low-budget, late-afternoon program became such a hit with young Southern Californians that it was syndicated nationally in 1964. Like "American Bandstand," Dick Clark's popular TV dance show out of Philadelphia that went national in 1957 on ABC-TV, what came to be called "The Lloyd Thaxton Show" featured teenagers dancing to records and guest appearances by top recording artists such as the Byrds, Jan and Dean, the Righteous Brothers, Sonny and Cher, and the Turtles. But new viewers quickly realized that the 30-something Thaxton was more than just a genial, dapperly dressed host. Humorously lip-syncing -- and doing assorted variations thereof -- to the hit records of the day was his signature. For a Herb Alpert instrumental version of "Zorba the Greek," Thaxton donned a fez and moved around the teenage dancers as he "played" two trumpets in his mouth. Another time, he sat at a grand piano "playing" Roger Williams' "Summer Wind" as a huge off-screen fan increasingly blew newspapers, toilet paper and assorted other debris at him. Thaxton would even cut a singer's lips out of an album cover and mouth the lyrics by putting his lips through the hole. And then there were Thaxton's famous "finger people" (painted faces on his thumb and/or other fingers), who would "lip-sync" to a record as Thaxton slightly bent his finger joints to open and close the painted-on mouths. In one "finger people" routine of Linda Laurie's recording of "Jose He Say," Thaxton wore a large sombrero and a droopy mustache and lip-synced the male part in a duet with his thumb, which was topped off with a small sombrero, doing the female part. The group of about 30 teenage dancers on each show, who came from different Southern California high schools, also got into the act in various contests, including lip-syncing contests in which the boys might lip-sync the girls' parts and vice versa. "It was an anything-for-a-laugh type of approach," said Dan Schaarschmidt of Research Video, who has been editing a pending "Best of" DVD of Thaxton's show. "A favorite quote of his was from a fan who wrote one time and said, 'When I first saw your show, I thought you were making fun of rock 'n' roll. And the more I watched, I realized you were making rock 'n' roll fun,' " Schaarschmidt said. "He really took that to heart as a mission statement of his show." The point of the lip-syncing and performing "other wild and crazy production numbers" was "to make the music visual and more entertaining to watch," Thaxton wrote on his blog, www.lloydthaxton.blogspot.com. "People started calling me a musical Ernie Kovacs," he said in a 2003 interview with The Times, referring to the late, visually creative comedian. Thaxton, who produced his dance program, would sign off by saying, "The name of the show is 'The Lloyd Thaxton Show,' and my name is Lloyd Thaxton." To which the teen dancers in the studio would shout, "SO WHAT!" "I was addicted to the show," said Jon Burlingame, a film and television music historian who teaches at USC and watched "The Lloyd Thaxton Show" on the NBC affiliate in Schenectady, N.Y., as a young teenager in the '60s. "The show was constantly entertaining," Burlingame said. "And I think the reason it was so entertaining was it wasn't just about spinning the current hits; it was funny in a way that didn't talk down to young people." During his peak as a TV dance show host in 1965, Thaxton's face appeared at the top of the newly launched Tiger Beat magazine (then known as "Lloyd Thaxton's Tiger Beat") for which he did a column...(more at link)

Happy Birthday marcello!

Man oh man, that's terrific! Congratulations!

Mike Maurer has come out of retirement to help the Eskimos. My favorite Maurer story is the one about the time he physically attacked a teammate on a bus ride when the guy, fresh from being cut by an NFL team, went on about how the NFL was better than the CFL! http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/Edm...7006841-cp.html

The trio will return to the US next month. Here are the dates: November 1st - Seattle, WA – Earshot Jazz – Triple Door November 2nd - San Francisco – SF Jazz Florence – Florence Gould Theatre November 3rd - Los Angeles, CA - Jazz Bakery November 6th - Chicago, IL - The Morse November 7th - Milwaukee, WI - Polish Cultural Center November 8th – Philadelphia, PA - Chris' Jazz Café November 9th – Baltimore, MD – An Die Musil November 10th - Columbus, OH – Wexner Center