Brownian Motion

For two years Herb was the best there was. I had no idea Bob Feller was still alive. He made his major league debut in 1936!

Red Allen, Pee Wee Russell, and a completely modern rhythm section recorded a live concert at, if I remember correctly, MIT in 1966 for Impulse. (I don't remember the rhythm section.) This was Whitney Balliet's bright idea; the musical results were dreadful.

http://www.rentapal.com/

I enjoy the "Great Guitars", a trio consisting of Herb Ellis, Barney Kessel, and Charlie Byrd which made half a dozen albums for Concord Jazz. Bola Sete is an interesting guitarist. I enjoy the albums he made in the 1960s with pianist Vince Guaraldi, although some of the music sounds schlocky today. Sete also recorded on his own, but I'm not familiar with this work. Tony Rice started out as a bluegrass musician, a tradition to which he has returned throughout his career, but his fast, clean acoustic guitar improvisations are unlike any of his predecessors in jazz or bluegrass.

October 23, 2008 Online Divorcee Jailed After Killing Virtual Hubby By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:10 p.m. ET TOKYO (AP) -- A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband's digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday. The woman, who is jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his identification and password to log onto popular interactive game ''Maple Story'' to carry out the virtual murder in mid-May, a police official in northern Sapporo said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy. ''I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry,'' the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations. The woman had not plotted any revenge in the real world, the official said. She has not yet been formally charged, but if convicted could face a prison term of up to five years or a fine up to $5,000. Players in ''Maple Story'' raise and manipulate digital images called ''avatars'' that represent themselves, while engaging in relationships, social activities and fighting against monsters and other obstacles. The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married, and killed the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead. The woman was arrested Wednesday and was taken across the country, traveling 620 miles from her home in southern Miyazaki to be detained in Sappporo, where the man lives, the official said. The police official said he did not know if she was married in the real world. In recent years, virtual lives have had consequences in the real world. In August, a woman was charged in Delaware with plotting the real-life abduction of a boyfriend she met through ''Second Life,'' another virtual interactive world. In Tokyo, police arrested a 16-year-old boy on charges of swindling virtual currency worth $360,000 in an interactive role playing game by manipulating another player's portfolio using a stolen ID and password. Virtual games are popular in Japan, and ''Second Life'' has drawn a fair number of Japanese participants. They rank third by nationality among users, after Americans and Brazilians.

Curried split pea soup and spoonbread.

I didn't realize that he moved to Boston to paint--Boston was not exactly a hotbed of artistic expression after WWII. Have you ever seen any of his paintings? I always wanted to ask Nat Hentoff about Newton's painting style, since Nat knew him. Nat never returned my call.

This Willie The Lion Smith CD features eight selections by the band that eventually evolved into the John Kirby Sextet. Newton, Pete Brown, and Buster Bailey are featured.

there are in fact real live tracks by the frankie newton orchestra from cafe society from january/february 1939! three tracks are on the "document records docd-1003" "rare live cuts": i´m gonna lock my heart (with billie holiday!), on the sunny side of the street and honeysuckle rose. the remastering from this original privat acetates was done by the one and only r.t. davies in 1997. keep boppin´ marcel Is this readily available? http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=1021066

Pickering Freddie Eliza

Dicky Wells Keg Johnson Claude Jones

I thought this was interesting. http://hungryblues.net/2004/03/09/inaugural/#comments

Thanks Allen. I listened to most of the samples, and confirmed my suspicion that this was not a live date surfacing 70 years later but merely a not-too-generous portion of Newton's studio dates from the 1930s, many of which have sub-par fidelity for the late 1930s. I don't quite understand the motivation of the fraudsters; it's not as if there's a huge international pool of Newton devotees to fleece.

Whereja find sound samples?

Can anyone confirm that these are live recordings? All listed song titles were recorded by Frankie Newton in studio versions as well, so I'm a little skeptical.

Actually, I would have guessed it'd be much larger. Books like The Little Red Book, Guerrilla Warfare, Steal This Book, The Anarchist Cookbook, anything by Bakunin, Marx, Fanon... I think there have to be others that have been banned. Darwin, for crying out loud!? I doubt this is accurate. I think it's accurate but incomplete.

Medical science making a god-like intervention on the side of intelligence?

Books Banned at One Time or Another in the United States A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Blubber by Judy Blume Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson Canterbury Tales by Chaucer Carrie by Stephen King Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Christine by Stephen King Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau Cujo by Stephen King Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Decameron by Boccaccio East of Eden by John Steinbeck Fallen Angels by Walter Myers Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes Forever by Judy Blume Grendel by John Champlin Gardner Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling Have to Go by Robert Munsch Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou Impressions edited by Jack Booth In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Lord of the Flies by William Golding Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein Lysistrata by Aristophanes More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier My House by Nikki Giovanni My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara Night Chills by Dean Koontz Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Ordinary People by Judith Guest Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz Separate Peace by John Knowles Silas Marner by George Eliot Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain The Bastard by John Jakes The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier The Color Purple by Alice Walker The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks The Living Bible by William C. Bower The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman The Pigman by Paul Zindel The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders The Shining by Stephen King The Witches by Roald Dahl The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth http://www.adlerbooks.com/banned.html

The New York Times September 2, 2008 The Evidence Gap For Widely Used Drug, Question of Usefulness Lingers By ALEX BERENSON When the Food and Drug Administration approved a new type of cholesterol-lowering medicine in 2002, it did so on the basis of a handful of clinical trials covering a total of 3,900 patients. None of the patients took the medicine for more than 12 weeks, and the trials offered no evidence that it had reduced heart attacks or cardiovascular disease, the goal of any cholesterol drug. The lack of evidence has not stopped doctors from heavily prescribing that drug, whether in a stand-alone form sold as Zetia or as a combination medicine called Vytorin. Aided by extensive consumer advertising, sales of the medicines reached $5.2 billion last year, making them among the best-selling drugs in the world. More than three million people worldwide take either drug every day. But there is still no proof that the drugs help patients live longer or avoid heart attacks. This year Vytorin has failed two clinical trials meant to show its benefits. Worse, scientists are debating whether there is a link between the drugs and cancer. Researchers reported last month that patients in three clinical trials had a 40 percent higher chance of dying from cancer if they took Vytorin instead of a sugar pill or another medicine, although the leader of that study says the finding might be due to chance. Now some prominent cardiologists say that the evidence has swung so decisively against the drugs that they should not be sold. “The only place people should be taking it is in a clinical trial,” Dr. Allen J. Taylor of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center said of Zetia. (Vytorin is a single pill that combines Zetia with a statin, an older form of cholesterol-lowering medicine whose effectiveness and safety are not in question.) On Tuesday, in a sign of the high level of interest among doctors that Vytorin and Zetia have generated, the New England Journal of Medicine will publish online two articles and an editorial about the trials that raised the potential cancer concerns. Merck and Schering-Plough, which jointly make Vytorin and Zetia, strongly defend their medicines. The companies say that ezetimibe, the generic name for Zetia, showed no cancer risk in animal trials and argue that the cancer finding is probably a result of chance. Some independent scientists agree with the companies, saying that they are dubious of a link to cancer and that ezetimibe is a valuable treatment no matter which brand it is sold under. About the only point on which both sides agree is that no one can judge ezetimibe’s safety and benefits for certain without more data, ideally from a clinical trial covering more than 10,000 patients and lasting several years, long enough to show that the drug actually helps patients live longer or avoid heart attacks. But patients and doctors will have to wait years more for those results. Merck and Schering did not begin such a trial until October 2005, three years after ezetimibe was approved. And the completion date for the trial has been repeatedly postponed. Now the companies estimate that it will not be finished until at least 2012. By then tens of millions of people will have taken ezetimibe. “I don’t think the answer on Zetia is in,” said Dr. Robert J. Temple, director for the office of medical policy at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which is part of the F.D.A. The lack of data about ezetimibe highlights an aspect of the drug approval system that even sophisticated patients may not understand. Many medicines are approved on the basis of what scientists call surrogate endpoints, like proof that they lower cholesterol, rather than because they have been shown to reduce the risk of death or disease. For example, a cancer drug might be approved because it causes tumors to shrink, not because its manufacturer can prove that patients live longer after taking it. Using these measures makes sense in certain circumstances, researchers say. If no treatments exist for a disease, the F.D.A. may approve a drug based on its promise in short-term trials and hope that the medicine succeeds later in larger trials where its potential to reduce death and disease will be examined directly. But several drugs approved this way have recently proved ineffective or even dangerous. In 1999, for example, the F.D.A. approved the diabetes drug Avandia on the basis that it reduced blood sugar. Sales of Avandia and two related medicines reached $3 billion in 2006. But in 2007, an analysis of 44 clinical trials of Avandia showed that it could increase heart attacks. Since then, prescriptions for Avandia have plunged, although the drug remains on the market. Ezetimibe is in a similar situation. The medicine has been proved to lower patients’ LDL, or bad, cholesterol by 15 to 20 percent. Decades of research links lower cholesterol to a reduced risk of heart attacks. And cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, including Lipitor and Crestor, have been proved to reduce heart attacks. But statins work very differently than ezetimibe, and no one has proved that ezetimibe offers the same benefits as statins. “The F.D.A. set the bar too low on the initial approval,” said Dr. Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic. “It would have been a lot better if the agency had said, ‘Show us that you do more than lower LDL a little bit, show us evidence of effectiveness.’ ” Further, when the F.D.A. approved Zetia, several statins were already on the market, giving patients other options to lower their cholesterol. So the agency’s decision to approve Zetia without requiring larger trials is especially puzzling, Dr. Nissen said. Dr. Temple said the link between LDL cholesterol and heart disease was so strong that the agency was comfortable approving drugs on the basis that they lowered cholesterol alone. “We accept LDL cholesterol as a valid surrogate,” he said. But the failure nearly two years ago of torcetrapib, an experimental drug from Pfizer, spotlighted the risks of using drugs without long-term data. Torcetrapib raised HDL cholesterol — the so-called “good” cholesterol, which is known to reduce the risk of heart problems. But the F.D.A. chose not to approve torcetrapib on the basis of its effects on HDL. Instead, the agency required that Pfizer first conduct a large trial. In December 2006, the trial revealed that torcetrapib raised patients’ risk of death by 60 percent, forcing Pfizer to discontinue development of the drug. Dr. Curt D. Furberg, an epidemiologist and drug safety expert at Wake Forest University, said that before approving drugs the F.D.A. should require that drug companies conduct large trials on whether they reduce death and disease, except in rare cases where no alternatives exist. If the agency approves drugs without such data, that fact should be noted prominently on a drug’s label, Dr. Furberg said. Pharmaceutical companies argue against changing the current approval system. Determining whether a drug reduces death or disease can require a trial that enrolls 10,000 or more patients and lasts four years or more. Requiring longer and costlier trials might discourage the development of new medicines, said Ken Johnson, senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. He said the current system enabled patients “to access life-saving and life-enhancing remedies more quickly.” The F.D.A. does seem to be taking a harder line on new diabetes and heart medicines. In April, the agency turned down an HDL-cholesterol-raising drug from Merck that did not have long-term trial data. And in July, an F.D.A. advisory panel recommended 14-2 that companies conduct long-term trials on new diabetes medicines. But for drugs already on the market, no such requirement exists. So ezetimibe remains heavily prescribed despite questions about both its effectiveness and whether it is linked to cancer. In January, Merck and Schering announced that Vytorin — the combination of ezetimibe and a generic statin called simvastatin — had failed a clinical trial meant to show that it could slow the growth of arterial plaque that could cause heart attacks. Then, in July, Norwegian researchers reported that another trial showed that patients taking Vytorin died from cancer more often than those taking a placebo, or sugar pill. In two other clinical trials still going on, patients taking Vytorin have also been more likely to die from cancer than those not taking it. In all, 136 of about 11,000 people taking Vytorin in the three trials have died of various kinds of cancer, compared with 95 out of 11,000 who took placebo or simvastatin alone. With little long-term data about ezetimibe’s risks, scientists are scrambling to find an explanation for the seeming cancer link. Some oncologists agree with Merck and Schering that the cancer findings are probably due to chance. But other scientists say they have a plausible explanation for why ezetimibe may cause cancer. Ezetimibe works by blocking the intestine from absorbing cholesterol. But it also blocks the absorption of closely related compounds called plant sterols, which are found in nuts and vegetables. Some studies have shown that people who eat large amounts of plant sterols have lower cancer rates than those who do not. Dr. Peter G. Bradford, a pharmacologist at the University of Buffalo who has extensively studied plant sterols, said that in laboratory tests, sterols promote cell death in a way that could make them valuable anti-cancer agents as weapons against tumors. By blocking sterol absorption, ezetimibe could be promoting cancer , he said. “One might envision that link,” he said. “This is a very large question.” Merck and Schering noted that the drug showed no carcinogenic effects in mice. In addition, the link between sterols and cancer remains hypothetical and has never been proved in a clinical trial. Further, cancer typically takes many years to develop in humans, so the theory that ezetimibe could cause cancer in a year or two is not plausible, they say. Some leading cancer researchers agree. Dr. Tyler Jacks, director of the Koch Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Merck had asked him to examine the results of the Norwegian trial and he concluded it was probably a false signal. If ezetimibe causes cancer, its effects should have become more pronounced as the trial went on, Dr. Jacks said. Instead, the gap between patients who took Vytorin and those who took a placebo did not widen over the length of the trial, he said. Dr. Terje Pedersen, the Norwegian cardiologist who conducted the trial, said he also doubted that Vytorin caused the excess of cancers seen in the study. Even very dangerous carcinogens — like cigarettes and radiation — typically require several years, even decades, to cause cancer. Given that fact, ezetimibe would have to be extraordinarily and implausibly carcinogenic to have noticeable effects in a three-year trial, he said. “The duration of the trial is not long enough to believe that the treatment would cause cancer,” Dr. Pedersen said. Still, the concerns about ezetimibe’s potential risks and lack of effectiveness have discouraged some patients from using the medicine. In the United States, prescriptions for Vytorin and Zetia have fallen 40 percent this year. Dr. Jacks said Merck and Schering could not easily resolve the questions about ezetimibe’s potential risks. “The answer is to get more data,” he said.

Franny Zoey Philip Johnson

27, and a tracking cookie.

Tom Riddle Tom Turnipseed The Root of All Evil

Peter Captain Hook The Lost Boys

Wendy Darling Honey Bunch Sweetums