Brownian Motion

Trixie Smith Chippie Hill Mahalia Jackson

Sister Sledge Scissor Sisters Sister Rosetta Tharpe Jim Thorpe Moe Berg Paul Robeson

Rick Stein Gordon Ramsay Sweary Mary The Merry Men The Maid Marion Audrey Hepburn

Ms. Lulu B. White

S Published: March 7, 2007 Filed at 12:41 p.m. ET Some Coins Lack 'In God We Trist' PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- An unknown number of new George Washington dollar coins were mistakenly struck without their edge inscriptions, including ''In God We Trust,'' and made it past inspectors and into circulation, the U.S. Mint said Wednesday. The properly struck dollar coins, bearing the likeness of George Washington, are inscribed along the edge with ''In God We Trust,'' ''E Pluribus Unum'' and the year and mint mark. They went into circulation Feb. 15. The mint struck 300 million of the coins, which are golden in color and slightly larger and thicker than a quarter. About half were made in Philadelphia and the rest in Denver. So far the mint has only received reports of error coins coming from Philadelphia, mint spokeswoman Becky Bailey said. Bailey said it was unknown how many coins didn't have the inscriptions. Ron Guth, president of Professional Coin Grading Service, one of the world's largest coin authentication companies, said he believes that at least 50,000 error coins were put in circulation. ''The first one sold for $600 before everyone knew how common they actually were,'' he said. ''They're going for around $40 to $60 on eBay now, and they'll probably settle in the $50 range.'' Production of the presidential dollar entails a ''new, complex, high-volume manufacturing system'' that the mint will adjust to eliminate any future defects, the mint said in a statement. ''We take this matter seriously. We also consider quality control a high priority. The agency is looking into the matter to determine a possible cause in the manufacturing process,'' the statement said. The coin's design has already spurred e-mail conspiracy theories claiming that the religious motto was purposely omitted from the Washington dollars. That rumor may have started because the edge lettering cannot be seen in head-on photographs of the coins. The Washington dollars are the first in a series of presidential coins slated to run until 2016. After Washington, the presidents to be honored on dollar coins this year will be John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Bailey said the striking of the Adams coin, expected to roll out in mid-May, will proceed as planned. ''We are adjusting the manufacturing process to try to eliminate the problems,'' she said. ------

No, the Joe Davis label. But you're correct that Foots also did at least one session under Cozy's name for Continental, producing four sides. These can be found on "The Continental Sessions Volume 2", and feature Coleman Hawkins. The Savoy sides were most recently reissued on Chronological Classics--Cozy Cole 1944, now oop. The Joe Davis sides, some of them featuring Hawk, some Ben Webster, are available on "Bean & Ben" on Harlequin, and four other titles arranged by Foots can be found here: with Budd Johnson handling the tenor sax work. If you're a completist, a bunch of alternative takes from some of these sessions are available on Neatwork under Hawk's and Ben's names. The common factor in all these sessions was Foots as arranger, section saxophonist, and--rarely--soloist.

I love these sessions. They were arranged by Walter "Foots" Thomas, and feature Hawk, and Emmett Berry on trumpet. These, and several very similar sessions, also arranged by Foots, on the Joe Davis label are among the very best swing sessions, imo.

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By March 6, 2007 Tech Researchers Calculate Digital Info By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 8:20 a.m. ET BOSTON (AP) -- A new study that estimates how much digital information is zipping around (hint: a lot) finds that for the first time, there's not enough storage space to hold it all. Good thing we delete some stuff. The report, assembled by the technology research firm IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mails, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content cascading through our world today. The researchers assumed that an average digital file gets replicated three times. Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes -- 161 exabytes -- of digital information last year. That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes. The previous best estimate came from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who totaled the globe's information production at 5 exabytes in 2003. One of the sponsors of that report, data-storage company EMC Corp., commissioned IDC's new look. But the Berkeley researchers had taken a different trail. They also counted non-electronic information, such as analog radio broadcasts or printed office memos, and tallied how much space that would consume if digitized. And they examined original data only, not all the times things got copied. In comparison, the IDC numbers ballooned with the inclusion of content as it was created and as it was reproduced -- for example, as a digital TV file was made and every time it landed on a screen. If IDC tracked original data only, its result would have been 40 exabytes. Two researchers who were not involved in the study said that because IDC used many of its own internal market analyses, the work will be hard to replicate and confirm. Those researchers, James Short and Roger Bohn of the University of California, San Diego, plan to use the Berkeley methods in a follow-up report. Bohn said it would be wise to take IDC's figures ''with a certain grain of salt,'' but he added: ''I don't think the numbers are going to turn out to be wildly off target.'' Considering that Berkeley's 2003 figure of 5 exabytes already was enormous -- it was said at the time to be 37,000 Libraries of Congress -- why does it matter how much more enormous the number is now? For one thing, said IDC analyst John Gantz, it's important to understand the factors behind the information explosion. Some of it is everyday stuff in this YouTube age -- IDC estimates that by 2010, about 70 percent of the world's digital data will be created by individuals. For corporations, information is inflating from such disparate causes as surveillance cameras and data-retention regulations. Perhaps most noteworthy is that the supply of data technically outstrips the supply of places to put it. IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010. ''If you had a run on the bank, you'd be in trouble,'' Gantz said. ''If everybody stored every digital bit, there wouldn't be enough room.'' Fortunately, storage space is not actually scarce and continues to get cheaper. That's because not everything gets warehoused. Not only do e-mails get deleted, but some digital signals are not made to linger, like the contents of phone calls. (Although, who's to say those conversations don't get catalogued someplace, perhaps the National Security Agency? The IDC researchers assumed the answer was no. ''I don't want men in black coming to look for me,'' Gantz joked.) But even if the IDC findings don't raise the prospect that disk drives will be virtually bursting at the seams, the study has intriguing implications. Among them: We'll need better technologies to help secure, parse, find and recover usable material in this universe of data. ------ On the Net: http://www.idc.com 2003 Berkeley study: http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projec ts/how-much-info-2003

Gerald Garcia Carlos Barbosa-Lima Sharon Isbin

Rule of Law is so pre-9/11.

Nice appreciation of Steve Lacy from today's New York Times. http://thescore.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/...tio-steve-lacy/

Ed Wynn Early Wynn The Toy Cannon

FDA Rules Override Warnings About Drug Cattle Antibiotic Moves Forward Despite Fears of Human Risk By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 4, 2007; A01 The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people. The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals. The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people. Echoing those concerns, the FDA's advisory board last fall voted to reject the request by InterVet Inc. of Millsboro, Del., to market the drug for cattle. Yet by all indications, the FDA will approve cefquinome this spring. That outcome is all but required, officials said, by a recently implemented "guidance document" that codifies how to weigh the threats to human health posed by proposed new animal drugs. The wording of "Guidance for Industry #152" was crafted within the FDA after a long struggle. In the end, the agency adopted language that, for drugs like cefquinome, is more deferential to pharmaceutical companies than is recommended by the World Health Organization. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7030301311.html

Ken Aspromonte Monte Hall Monte Smith

Morgan the Pirate Pirate Jennie Anne Bonny

This is creepy. Reminds me of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". Happy Birthday, Johnny.

Apparently a CD, "Peggy Gilbert & The Dixie Belles", is going to be released on 3/13. I'm curious enough to buy it.

Who says there's nothing happening in Charlotte?

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By February 25, 2007 Peggy Gilbert, 102, Dies; Led Female Jazz Ensembles By MARGALIT FOX Peggy Gilbert, a noted jazz saxophonist and bandleader who for decades led all-female ensembles in hot jazz, a daring venture when she began her career more than 80 years ago, died on Feb. 12 in Los Angeles. She was 102 and had lived there for many years. The cause was complications of hip surgery, said Jeannie Pool, a friend. A musicologist and filmmaker, Dr. Pool made a documentary about Ms. Gilbert, “Peggy Gilbert and Her All-Girl Band,” narrated by Lily Tomlin and completed last year. Long before the proliferation of women’s bands in the World War II era, and long afterward, Ms. Gilbert presided over a series of jazz groups, performing widely and appearing in Hollywood films like “The Wet Parade” (1932), “Melody for Two” (1937) and “The Great Waltz” (1938). She was also known as an advocate for women trying to make their way in jazz, a culture long hostile to female instrumentalists. To contemporary audiences, Ms. Gilbert was best known for the Dixie Belles, a Dixieland band of older women she formed in 1974, when she was 69. (Reviewers said Ms. Gilbert blew a mean tenor sax until she was well into her 90s.) The Dixie Belles, who performed together until 1998, were featured on the “Tonight” show and on several sitcoms, among them “The Golden Girls,” “Dharma & Greg,” “The Ellen Show” and “Married With Children.” For most of the 20th century, Ms. Gilbert toured the country by station wagon, plane, ship and even dogsled. She played on vaudeville stages and in glittering nightclubs; on military bases and in millionaires’ mansions; and once, to her dismay, in what turned out to be a circus. Along the way, she encountered incredulity, outright rejection and auditions at which band members were asked to lift their skirts to prove they had good legs. All this Ms. Gilbert endured, because from the time she was a schoolgirl in Iowa, all she really wanted to do was play the saxophone. When Margaret Fern Knechtges was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on Jan. 17, 1905, her parents had a piano waiting. Her father, John Darwin Knechtges, was a violinist and the conductor of the Hawkeye Symphony Orchestra, which accompanied silent films. Her mother, the former Edith Gilbert, was an opera chorister. Young Peggy dutifully learned the piano and the violin. At 7, she toured the Midwest in a Highland dance troupe with the Scottish music hall star Harry Lauder. But by the time she was in high school, Peggy was yearning to play the jazz she heard on the radio. After the school refused her request to learn the saxophone — large wind instruments, she was told, were not suitable for young ladies — she simply taught herself. “The first time I picked up a sax, I said, ‘This is it!’, ” Ms. Gilbert told The Los Angeles Times last year. “I loved the feel of it —free and loose.” In 1924, the year after she graduated from high school, Ms. Gilbert started her first women’s band, the Melody Girls, which played at a Sioux City hotel and on the radio. In 1928 she moved to California, where she took her mother’s maiden name. No one could pronounce Knechtges anyway. (It was pronounced kuh-NET-chiz.) In Los Angeles she started a band that over the years performed under various names, including Peggy Gilbert and Her Metro Goldwyn Orchestra, Peggy Gilbert and Her Symphonics and Peggy Gilbert and Her Coeds. The band toured the vaudeville circuit with stars like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante. It also played in popular Los Angeles nightclubs, sometimes sharing the bill with jazz titans like Benny Goodman and Louis Prima. In addition, Ms. Gilbert served as an unofficial employment agency for female musicians, securing on-screen work for them in films. After the United States entered World War II, she helped find places in military bands for male musicians who had been drafted, sparing them combat. “She just got on the phone and called every bandleader she knew who’d enlisted and said, ‘I’ve got a 19-year-old trumpet player here — can you take him?’ ” Dr. Pool, who is also writing a book about Ms. Gilbert, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. During the war, the heyday of women’s bands, Ms. Gilbert toured Alaska with a U.S.O. show starring the actress Thelma White. After the war, when men returned to the bandstand, and the demand for women’s bands dried up, she worked as a secretary for the Los Angeles local of the American Federation of Musicians, continuing to perform at night and on weekends. Ms. Gilbert, who was divorced after an early marriage, is survived by her companion of more than 60 years, Kay Boley, a former vaudeville performer and contortionist whom she met when they appeared at the same nightclub. With her Dixieland band, she recorded a CD, “Peggy Gilbert and the Dixie Belles,” produced by Dr. Pool for the Cambria label. One of the very few obstacles it seemed Ms. Gilbert could not surmount was the scarcity, early on, of women (or, in fact, anyone) skilled enough to play jazz at the level she required. “Sometimes, in a pinch, she’d have to hire a man, because she didn’t have enough women players,” Dr. Pool said. “In the ’30s, she was doing four, five and six jobs a day. The women would make fun of the guys, because they couldn’t read music. And they’d say: ‘Don’t ever hire that guy again. He’s not really a musician.’ ”

Mother Earth Father Christmas Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

The Monotones The Drones Andy Warhol

I just received a phish notice purportedly from Paypal that is distinguished in a couple of respects: >It addresses me by my name. >It was received on my new email account, which has only been active for 5 weeks. It was most likely an Amazon seller that gave my name and address to this scammer--my guess would be someone with a large sales volume, although I don't rule out the possibility that it could instead have been an administrator at Verizon, Amazon, or Ebay-Paypal. Lots of suspects and little evidence. Fuckers.

Little Brown Little Ives A Man with Seven Wives

Jerry Newman Barry Newman The New Woman