GA Russell

My sister had that one! Christmas of 1963 as I recall. People forget what a breath of fresh air the British Invasion was.

That day will come, Kevin!

I don't think that's Brady's style!

http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home ...the Patriots also cut quarterback Vinny Testaverde, who at 43 would have been entering his 21st season in the NFL. Free agent Kenton Keith now inherits the backup job behind Joseph Addai — at least temporarily. Keith, a veteran of the Canadian Football League, has never had an NFL carry. Quarterback Tim Hasselbeck, who lost the No. 3 job to Anthony Wright also was cut as the Giants released 21 players. (Isn't he the husband of that woman on television?) Heisman Trophy winner Troy Smith made the Baltimore Ravens final roster Saturday as a third-string quarterback.

Toronto Argonauts 32....Hamilton Tiger-Cats 14 http://sports.canada.com/default.asp?c=can.../AJN4100499.htm I tuned in for the fourth quarter, and the Argos already had it in the bag by that time. Michael Bishop returned from his broken wrist layoff and looked good. By the way, I read yesterday that when a player is placed on the nine-week injured list, his salary does not count against the salary cap. I suspect that explains why Damon Allen is on the list for his toe injury. Calgary Stampeders 35....Edmonton Eskimos 24 http://sports.canada.com/default.asp?c=can.../AJN4100561.htm It was a tale of two halves. The Eskimos scored 17 points on Calgary turnovers and errors in the first half and led throughout. But it was all Calgary in the second half, as they stopped fumbling and making stupid penalties. ***** During the off-season I commented that I felt that Kerry Joseph and Henry Burris are the two most overrated players in the league, and that Kemau Peterson drops too many passes. The press even took to calling him Kemau Incompleterson. But I will admit that so far all three are having their best years as pros.

Happy Birthday unum!

In 1968 I worked for a radio station, and had the pleasure of meeting Jean The Shrimp Shrimpton. She was billed as "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World", and I wouldn't disagree. The models of today can't hold a candle to her IMO. I saw a picture of her a few years ago, and she looked terrible, with bags under her eyes and a double chin. But in her day she was the greatest of them all!

Saskatchewan Roughriders 31....Winnipeg Blue Bombers 26 http://sports.canada.com/default.asp?c=can.../AJN4100379.htm Sounds like a great game!

Ever see Arthur Jones on TV? A real character. I'm surprised that both of his parents were physicians. First of all, they must have been free thinkers to let him quit school and bum around like he did. Second, his mother being a doctor in 1927 must have been a pretty rare individual herself. Here's his LA Times obit: Arthur Jones, 80; his Nautilus machines revolutionized the fitness industry By Jon Thurber, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 1, 2007 Arthur Jones, the flamboyant inventor and entrepreneur whose Nautilus machines made weightlifting chic in the 1970s and '80s and changed exercise culture in America, has died. He was 80. Jones died Tuesday of natural causes at his estate in Ocala, Fla., according to his son, William. "Nautilus revolutionized the fitness-center business," said Joe Moore, president of International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Assn., a trade organization for commercial health clubs. "Many of the innovations he came up with in the 1970s are still incorporated into strength training on machines of all brands." When Jones introduced his first Nautilus machine at a fitness competition in Culver City in 1970, weightlifting was a narrowly specialized activity undertaken by hard-core bodybuilders, often in dank gyms. Their response to his machine was less than enthusiastic. "Real men use free weights," was their mantra. But Jones' line of machines, which offered a variable resistance technique to replace the dead weight of traditional dumbbells and barbells, began to catch on with an audience he never envisioned: average people. From the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, Nautilus cornered the conditioning business in America. Stylish Nautilus facilities sprang up around the country and were staffed by knowledgeable trainers who guided clients through brisk 30-minute workouts. "These Nautilus gyms really took off," said Wayne Westcott, a professor at Quincy College in Massachusetts and fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Boston. "It was a quick, intense workout. There was a fixed movement pattern on each machine, so there wasn't a large learning curve. It was far safer and [more] time efficient than free weights." Jones, a rough-hewn man who carried a gun, chain-smoked Pall Mall cigarettes and once boasted that he "shot 630 elephants and 63 men, and I regret the elephants more," reaped the benefits. He was secretive about his wealth, but at one time his Nautilus company was believed to be grossing $300 million a year. The son of two physicians, Jones was born in 1924 in Arkansas and grew up outside Tulsa, Okla. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade, saying that he had learned all he needed from the education system, and rode the rails for a time before serving in the Navy during World War II. After the war, he set off on an eclectic career that included running an airline in South America, dodging danger in Africa as a big-game collector for zoos and circuses, and working as a pilot, moviemaker and host of a syndicated animal show, "Wild Cargo." A multimillionaire, Jones developed Jumbolair Aviation Estates in Ocala whose most noted resident is actor John Travolta. Jones' personal 600-acre estate in Ocala was populated with 90 elephants, 300 alligators, 400 crocodiles, a gorilla, three rhinos and a menagerie of poisonous snakes and insects. He owned and flew several jetliners and was married six times; most of his wives were age 16 to 20 on their wedding day. Jones once summed up his favorite activities: "Younger women, faster airplanes and bigger crocodiles." He is survived by at least four children. Self-taught in most of the disciplines he mastered, Jones learned physiology by studying cadavers, a daughter once told People magazine. "We always had an arm or something in the freezer," she said. He built his first exercise machine while living at the Tulsa YMCA in 1948. During the next 22 years, he would continue to refine and improve the engineering, eventually coming up with the pullover torso machine. He called his company Nautilus because the kidney-shaped cam that was a key development in creating his line of equipment looked like a nautilus seashell. Jones not only developed the machines; he also designed a workout regimen to go with them. His system preached steady, controlled repetition, which was not always the case in free-weight gyms. A lifter would start by doing one set of eight to 12 repetitions on each machine and work his or her way up to doing three sets on each machine. His regimen demanded correct form with full range of motion, and was to be performed two to three non-consecutive days a week to allow muscles time to recover. When a lifter could handle doing three sets at a given weight, more weight would be added at the next workout. His machines and workout regimen caught on with professional athletes as well. After selling Nautilus to Texas oilman Travis Ward in 1986, Jones turned his attention to rehabilitating spine and neck injuries, developing new exercise machines through a company called MedX, which he owned until the mid-1990s. Much of that equipment became staples in sports medicine. Jones was also interested in improving the lives of geriatric patients in nursing homes, using his Nautilus equipment to regain their range of motion. Moore, the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Assn. president, said that one of the legacies of the Nautilus era was the idea of one-to-one training, which spawned a new industry of personal trainers. "The Nautilus centers would have a trainer, and a client would go through the line of machines, set the weight pin and move you on to the next machine when you completed your set of repetitions. It was one of the first circuit-training systems," Moore said.

The NFL is making its final cuts this weekend. Kenton Keith made the Indianapolis squad. http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home ***** The Argos expect to sign Marc Boerigter this week. Here's an article that says that he has had two knee surgeries, and confirms that salary was a reason they cut Bashir Levingston. http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/Tor...463398-sun.html ***** Does anybody else have the impression that right now all four Western teams are better than all four Eastern teams?

In 1969 I bought Herbie Mann's Flute Souffle mono for probably $1.99 when the record stores were clearing out their mono copies of everything. Both the front and back of the album cover say Status, but the record itself is a blue label Prestige. It's always sounded OK to me.

Chet Baker Live PJ, disc 2 The music of this box was released by PJ as three separate CDs in 2000-2001. I think that more tracks were found for those later releases, but I haven't gone over the lists track by track to be sure.

I have the cassette tape of that one. I enjoy pulling it out once a year. I like the Europeans from that period.

Here's an article from the CP today that says that Printers has been with Kansas City this camp, and was cut yesterday. http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home ***** Week 10 previews: http://sports.canada.com/default.asp?c=can.../AJN4099761.htm ***** Friday result: British Columbia Lions 46....Montreal Alouettes 14 http://sports.canada.com/default.asp?c=can.../AJN4099943.htm

I remember The Beer Hunter TV show. Can't say that I remember him fondly, but he contributed to his own niche in the world, and so we are the less for his passing.

I know what to say. I've been saying it for years: The secret to happiness is to never expect anything from the Boston Red Sox.

This is from Ars Technica. You can see the charts here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070...s-possibly.html By Nate Anderson | Published: August 30, 2007 - 07:20AM CT Gaming sometimes seems like a "niche," and the mainstream media certainly treats it that way. However, a comparison of the gaming market with that of movies and music shows that gaming is much larger than many people think. Hence our ears perked up when Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said last week that the video game market was poised for massive growth—a 50 percent increase over the next four years. Assuming that Guillemot isn't simply blowing fumée about his industry's growth potential (always a possibility at these kind of events), video games will soon run eclipse both box office revenues and recorded music revenues. That a lot of copies of Halo to move; is gaming really ready to get this big? Let's run the numbers. The US market We'll start with the US market, then take a look at the worldwide picture. We have collected revenue statistics from the the last five years for the music, movies, and gaming sectors; you can see them helpfully overlaid on the chart below. What you're looking at is industry revenues, expressed in billions of dollars. Gaming had some major growth, but much of it was in the past, when the industry surged from $2.6 billion in sales to $7 billion between 1996 and 2000. Over the last five years, though, none of the three categories has shown much evidence of explosive growth. Music (which includes CD sales, digital sales, music video sales, and mobile song downloads), in fact, has dropped from a peak of $14.58 billion in 1999 to only $11.5 billion in 2006, and it is expected to fall even further by 2010. The idea that games have been hurtling upward and stand ready to eclipse more traditional entertainment forms looks a bit dubious based on past data. To be sure, games showed remarkable growth in the 1990s, but they appear to have leveled out recently at a rate below that of music and movies. Note also that "movies" here includes only the US box office take from theaters; throw in DVD sales and everything else the industry does to earn money, and the total movie industry is worth much more. If we look at "media consumption per person" data, we find that the average number of hours spent with video games has also remained quite flat over the same time period. The peak, in fact, was in 2004, when gamers spent 78 hours a year before the glow of a monitor or television. But what about the future? Now, in Guillemot's defense, there are a few factors that could give gaming a boost over the next few years (requests to Ubisoft for the data used by Guillemot were not returned by press time). First, of course, the worldwide situation could be dramatically different than it is in the US. Music and movies are widespread across the globe and the equipment to play them back is cheap and easy to get. Video games are a different matter, since hardware remains pricey and is required in order to play even illicit copies of video games. Huge new markets could be coming online in other parts of the globe as incomes go up, opening the door to big new groups of gamers (see below). The flattening of game sales in 2005 in particular may have had something to do with the US consumers settling into a holding pattern until the next-gen consoles appeared. Making this idea problematic, though, is the fact that the PS2 continues to sell like hotcakes even today and was doing big business in 2005 as it was cheap to acquire and great games were plentiful. But Guillemot appears to believe in the power of devices like the Wii to bring in whole new generations of gamers, including those who have never touched a console controller in their lives. This group could provide a big revenue boost even in countries like the US. The Wii has certainly been selling well, but it's still a bit early to start writing the "How the Wii Changed the Face of Gaming" feature, as the Wii hasn't been for sale long enough to show up on these kinds of charts. Guillemot's prediction relies on "crystal balling" the future, and in that sense it is something of a dodgy game. We contacted The NPD Group, which collects the industry-standard gaming sales figures (even the ESA uses them), and were told that NPD isn't in the business of forecasting precisely because of its inaccuracy. "Forecasting is comparable to throwing darts in the dark," NPD tells Ars. "Analysts rarely get it right. We don't want to be lumped in that category because the nature of our business is to provide accurate sales and consumer data, and only accurate data. Forecasting can hurt us if we're not careful." But other analysts are willing to make projections. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, for instance, produces a major "Global Entertainment and Media Outlook" report each year, and this year's version projects sales data up until 2011. Its numbers for total US video game sales are a bit higher than NPD's for the period 2002-2006, but the important point here isn't the actual figures; it's the percentage increase. As you can see in the chart above, gaming sales are in fact predicted to jump substantially. Between 2006 and 2011, they should grow by 38 percent. Strong growth, but not really up to Guillemot's prediction. When we look at the rest of the world, though, it turns out that Asian, European, and Latin American gamers are all ready to start spending. Guillemot might still be stretching la vérité a bit, but at least he's on the right pitch. Around the world If we look at worldwide numbers, we see that the video gaming market (not including hardware) is projected to grow by more than 100 percent in the ten years from 2002-2011. In fact, it turns out that every other region of the world is expected to experience more growth than the US over the next five years, which probably represents the relative maturity of the US market more than any American lack of time, resources, or interest in decapitating aliens with head shots. Looking specifically at Guillemot's prediction, we find that gaming is in fact expected to surge by 50 percent between 2006 and 2011 (from $31.6 billion to $48.9 billion), though this is certainly a longer timeframe than Guillemot's "four years." Now, if these numbers hold up, they compare quite favorably with projections for the worldwide recorded business in 2011. As we've previously reported, music sales are estimated to slip into the $25 billion neighborhood (not exactly a low-rent area, but down from much higher numbers earlier in the decade) by 2011. If that's true, music will be crushed by video games—nearly doubled, actually—in just a few short years. Imagine a gaming organization with twice the heft of the RIAA. The ESA has been active politically but in many ways still seems to be learning the game. Its members should have the cash to buy plenty of clout, though, and perhaps they will soon have better luck in stopping misguided video game legislation before it passes and can stop defeating the states in court. This kind of market power could also be a boon to the industry in other ways; it might finally silence those who carp about games being "just for kids" or about just "blowing up aliens." According to the ESA, two-thirds of US heads of households already play games, and the average age for a gamer is 33 years old, but reality has still not quieted the dismissive sounds of some critics. Perhaps $49 billion in global revenues will.

The Argos cut Bashir Levingston today. I imagine that he had a pretty good salary, and the article says that they didn't really need him anymore because of Dominique Dorsey's success. http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home

TTK, the Fantasy album which has received the best press over the years has been Monterey Concert, which was a double album now on one CD. One day I'll buy it. ***** Tuesday I saw on YouTube a video from 1975 of Cal with Clare Fischer playing Soul Sauce. I was surprised at how hard Cal struck the vibes with his mallets. He makes it sound easy, but he didn't make it look easy.

After thinking about it for a day, I'm really sorry that I didn't vote for Jim, Joe and Randy for their respective instruments too. The guys I voted for are worthy but they don't need my votes. It would be great to see the names of the group and its three members in the mag, knowing that all the world will see them and wonder, "Who are these guys?"

I'm not in the market for a new radio, but I was at the shopping center of my local Super Target, so I dropped in to see if they had any of the two Tivoli items you guys are talking about. They didn't. They did have a Tivoli Model One radio for $119.

BClug, I assume you are saying that Buck Pierce has been put on the injured list too, is that right? Maybe his hand and rib injuries weren't getting any better while he played, and Wally figured that it would be better to give him a rest to recover while the team played an Eastern team. ***** I mentioned some weeks ago that during a game I listened to between the Eskimos and the Stamps, AJ Gass was thrown out for flinging a Stamps helmet down the field during a melee. Gass appealed his one-game suspension to an arbitrator, and today he won! I can't believe it. It looks to me like the arbitrator decided to play Commissioner-for-a-day and second guess the league's decision. If any league can't suspend a player for a game because of his involvement in a fight, all the games will be up for grabs. http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/New...4455906-cp.html ***** When Damon Allen hurt his toe right after Michael Bishop broke his wrist, I read an article about the Argos' QB woes. It mentioned their efforts to find a new QB during the off-season, and said that Casey Printers had been considered but received a better offer from an NFL team. It didn't mention the team. Does anyone know who Casey Printers is with now?

Break a leg! I hope your stage is near the porta-johns. When I went to the 1990 New Orleans Jazzfest, an unknown blues singer/guitarist named Kenny Neal was performing on a very small stage next to the johns. He had a small audience, plus everyone in the long lines waiting to use the johns (including me). Over the course of the set, his audience kept growing until it became quite sizeable. Everyone (including me) who had been waiting in line stuck around for the remainder of the set. The next year he was featured on a bigger stage. He has gone on to have a good career. And I think it all started with his captive audience!

This is just a reminder that the Downbeat Readers Poll ends August 31. You can vote online this year here: http://www.downbeat.com/ I voted yesterday. I keep all of the CDs I have opened up in the past twelve months on the top shelf, so I reviewed them all and came to these conclusions: Art Pepper - The Last Concert - historical album Stefano Bollani - Piano Solo - new album Sonny Rollins - group Tomasz Stanko - trumpet John Surman - baritone sax Nels Cline - guitar (really for 2006) John Vance - male vocalist Janice Friedman - female vocalist Cryptogramophone (again, really for 2006) Last year I didn't vote, but if I had I would have voted for either Joey DeFrancesco or Paul Motian as Jazzman of the Year. This year I couldn't think of anyone who stood out, so I voted for Joey D. Too bad the readers don't get to vote for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition. Organissimo would get a lot of votes for best group! If I could take my vote back I would, and vote for the band. If you haven't already voted, let's stuff the ballot box, and get the band's name in the Readers Poll issue, which as I recall is the December one. edit to add subtitle

I went to the library today and used their computer with its DSL hookup. I went to the CFL YouTube site and didn't notice anything about subscriptions. What I saw was highlights of every game played so far. Most of them were scoring drives. Highly recommended!