Brownian Motion

Thanks to all for the valuable input.

Joe "Fingers" Carr Crazy Otto Conlon Nancarrow

My daughter is studying in Madrid next semester, and we need to buy her round trip air fare. I have checked out Orbitz and Travelocity, but the round trip tickets they offer seem to triple in price if I try to buy one--1200.00 becomes 3800.00. Any advice would be welcome.

Fiske Boyd Boyd Hanna Hannah Montana

John Dow Katherine St. George The Dragon

Edsel Ford Lester Maddox Ford Maddox Ford

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Franklin Roosevelt Jr. John Kennedy Jr.

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By November 20, 2007 Books of The Times Power to Soothe the Savage Breast and Animate the Hemispheres By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Skip to next paragraph MUSICOPHILIA Tales of Music and the Brain By Oliver Sacks 381 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26. In books like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” the physician Oliver Sacks has given us some compelling and deeply moving portraits of patients in predicaments so odd, so vexing, so metaphysically curious that they read like something out of a tale by Borges or Calvino. In his latest book, “Musicophilia,” Dr. Sacks focuses on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers — “musical misalignments” that affect their professional and daily lives. A composer of atonal music starts having musical hallucinations that are “tonal” and “corny”: irritating Christmas songs and lullabies that play endlessly in his head. A musical savant with a “phonographic” memory learns the melodies to hundreds of operas, as well as what every instrument plays and what every voice sings. A composer with synesthesia sees specific colors when he hears music in different musical keys: G minor, for instance, is not just “yellow” but “ocher”; D minor is “like flint, graphite”; and F minor is “earthy, ashy.” A virtuosic pianist who for many years bizarrely lost the use of his right hand, finds at the age of 36 that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand have started to curl uncontrollably under his palm when he plays. Dr. Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent, and he’s able in these pages to convey both the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the equally profound mysteries of music: an art that is “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” devoid of the power to “represent anything particular or external,” but endowed with the capacity to express powerful, inchoate moods and feelings. He muses upon the unequal distribution of musical gifts among the human population: Che Guevara, he tells us, was “rhythm deaf,” capable of dancing a mambo while an orchestra was playing a tango, whereas Freud and Nabokov seemed incapable of receiving any pleasure from music at all. He writes about the “narrative or mnemonic power of music,” its ability to help a person follow intricate sequences or retain great volumes of information — a power that explains why music can help someone with autism perform procedures he or she might otherwise be incapable of. And he writes about the power of rhythm to help coordinate and energize basic locomotive movement, a power that explains why music can help push athletes to new levels and why the right sort of music (generally, legato with a well-defined rhythm) can help liberate some parkinsonian patients from “their frozenness.” Indeed, this volume makes a powerful case for the benefits of music therapy. In Dr. Sacks’ view, music can aid aphasics and patients with parkinsonism, and it can help orient and anchor patients with advanced dementia because “musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.” Music, he says, can act as a “Proustian mnemonic, eliciting emotions and associations that had been long forgotten, giving the patient access once again to mood and memories, thoughts and worlds that had seemingly been completely lost.” As he’s done in his earlier books, Dr. Sacks underscores the resilience of the human mind, the capacity of some people to find art in affliction, and to adapt to loss and deprivation. Among the people who appear in this book are children with Williams syndrome, who have low I.Q.’s and extraordinary musical and narrative gifts (one young woman learns to sing operatic arias in more than 30 languages), and elderly dementia patients who develop unexpected musical talents. Dr. Sacks notes that there are stories in medical literature about people who develop artistic gifts after left-hemisphere strokes, and he suggests that “there may be a variety of inhibitions — psychological, neurological and social — which may, for one reason or another, relax in one’s later years and allow a creativity as surprising to oneself as to others.” The composer Tobias Picker, who has Tourette’s, tells Dr. Sacks that the syndrome has shaped his imagination: “I live my life controlled by Tourette’s but use music to control it. I have harnessed its energy — I play with it, manipulate it, trick it, mimic it, taunt it, explore it, exploit it, in every possible way.” Dr. Sacks notes that while the composer’s newest piano concerto “is full of turbulent, agitated whirls and twirls” in sections, Mr. Picker is able to write in every mode — “the dreamy and tranquil no less than the violent and stormy” — and can move “from one mood to another with consummate ease.” Although this book could have benefited from some heavy-duty editing that would have removed repetitions and occasional patches of technical jargon, these lapses are easily overlooked by the reader, so powerful and compassionate are Dr. Sacks’ accounts of his patients’ dilemmas. He has written a book that not only contributes to our understanding of the elusive magic of music but also illuminates the strange workings, and misfirings, of the human mind. Home

Bobby Darin Fabian George Bernard Shaw

I'm sensing a little hostility here. Goddamn fuck shit piss, papsrus, shit asshole damn shit hell! What the fuck are you talking about, motherfucker? You're a sad, pathetic lonely fucking man! Natural Soul, You have fingered the wrong dude.

Princess Sparkle Pony A Man Called Horse Hoss

It's a work-in-progress.

http://dickipedia.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Did Haggart compose any other first rate ballads?

I have an ugly truth for the thread's cat buffs. Your cats are using you.

Bill Peete Piet Mondrian Peter Paul Rubens

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By November 15, 2007 Barry Bonds Indicted on Perjury and Obstruction Charges By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Baseball superstar Barry Bonds was charged Thursday with perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying when he said he did not use performance-enhancing drugs. The indictment, unsealed Thursday by federal prosecutors in San Francisco, is the culmination of a four-year federal probe into whether he lied under oath to a grand jury investigating steroid use by elite athletes. The indictment comes three months after the 43-year-old Bonds, one of the biggest names in professional sports, passed Hank Aaron to become baseball's career home run leader, his sport's most hallowed record. Bonds, who parted ways with the San Francisco Giants at the end of last season and has yet to sign with another team, also holds the game's single-season home run record of 73. While Bonds was chasing Aaron amid the adulation of San Franciscans and the scorn of baseball fans almost everywhere else, due to his notoriously prickly personality and nagging steroid allegations, a grand jury quietly worked behind closed doors to put the finishing touches on the long-rumored indictment. "I'm surprised," said John Burris, one of Bonds' attorneys, "but there's been an effort to get Barry for a long time. "I'm curious what evidence they have now they didn't have before." Burris did not know of the indictment before being alerted by The Associated Press. He said he would immediate call Bonds to notify him. The indictment charges Bonds with lying when he said that he didn't knowingly take steroids given to him by his personal trainer Greg Anderson. He also denied taking steroids at anytime in 2001 when he was pursuing the single season home-run record. "During the criminal investigation, evidence was obtained including positive tests for the presence of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances for Bonds and other athletes," the indictment reads. He is also charged with lying that Anderson never injected him with steroids. "Greg wouldn't do that," Bonds testified in December 2003 when asked if Anderson ever gave him any drugs that needed to be injected. "He knows I'm against that stuff." Bonds is by far the highest-profile figure caught up in the wide-ranging government steroids investigation launched in 2002 with the raid of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative -- now infamously known as BALCO -- the Burlingame-based supplements lab at the center of a large steroids distribution ring. Allegations of steroid use long have dogged Bonds, the son of an ex-Major Leaguer who broke into baseball with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1986 as a lithe, base-stealing outfielder. By the late 1990s he'd grown to more than 240 pounds, with his head, in particular, becoming noticeably bigger. Bonds' physical growth was accompanied by a remarkable power surge. During the 2001 season he broke Mark McGwire's single-season home run crown, and by 2006, he'd passed Babe Ruth to move into second-place among the sport's most prolific power hitters. He will soon in all likelihood surpass Aaron's career mark of 755 homers. Speculation of his impending indictment had mounted for more than a year. In July 2006, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, who led the investigation, took the unusual step of going public with the probe by announcing he was handing it off to a new grand jury when the previous panel's 18-month term expired. Prosecutors are typically secretive about grand jury proceedings. At the center of the investigation is Bonds' childhood friend and personal trainer, Greg Anderson, who spent most of the past year in a federal detention center for refusing to testify to the grand jury investigating Bonds' alleged perjury. According to testimony obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, Bonds testified in 2003 that he took two substances given to him by Anderson -- which he called "the cream" and "the clear" -- to soothe aches and pains and help him better recover from injuries. The substances fit the description of steroids peddled by BALCO founder Victor Conte. But when questioned under oath by investigators, Bonds famously said he believed Anderson had given him flaxseed oil and an arthritic balm. Investigators and the public had their doubts. Aiming to prove Bonds a liar, prosecutors tried to compel Anderson to testify. When he refused, they jailed him for contempt. Bonds joins a parade of defendants tied to the BALCO investigation, including Anderson, who served three months in prison and three months of home detention after pleading guilty to steroid distribution and money laundering. Conte also served three months in prison after he pleaded guilty to steroids distribution. Patrick Arnold, the rogue chemist who created the designer steroid THG, BALCO vice president James Valente and track coach Remi Korchemny also all also pleaded guilty. Korchemny and Valente were sentenced to probation and Arnold sent to prison for four months. Kirk Radomski, a former New York Mets clubhouse attendant, pleaded guilty April 27 to drug and money laundering charges after federal officials said he became Major League Baseball's biggest steroids dealer after BALCO shut down. Elite cyclist Tammy Thomas and track coach Trevor Graham have each pleaded not guilty to lying to a grand jury and federal investigators about their involvement with steroids. Troy Ellerman, a defense attorney who represented two of the BALCO figures, pleaded guilty to leaking confidential grand jury transcripts to the San Francisco Chronicle and then denying he was the leak in court documents filed under penalty of perjury. Dozens of other prominent athletes have been connected to BALCO, including New York Yankees slugger Jason Giambi who told the grand jury he injected steroids purchased at BALCO and Detroit Tigers outfielder Gary Sheffield who testified that Bonds introduced him to BALCO.

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By November 14, 2007 Birder Admits Killing Cat, but Was It Animal Cruelty? By KATE MURPHY GALVESTON, Tex., Nov. 13 — Jurors heard opening arguments on Tuesday in the trial of a bird-watching enthusiast who fatally shot a cat that he said was stalking endangered shorebirds. The defendant, James M. Stevenson, is the founder of the Galveston Ornithological Society and leads bird-watching tours on this Gulf Coast island 60 miles southeast of Houston. If convicted on animal cruelty charges in the shooting last November, he faces up to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine. Mr. Stevenson, 54, does not deny using a .22-caliber rifle fitted with a scope to kill the cat, which lived under the San Luis Pass toll bridge, linking Galveston to the mainland. He also admits killing many other cats on his own property, where he operates a bed and breakfast for some of the estimated 500,000 birders who come to the island every year. In her opening statement, Paige L. Santell, a Galveston County assistant district attorney, told the jury of eight women and four men that Mr. Stevenson “shot that animal in cold blood” and that the cat died a slow and painful death “gurgling on its own blood.” She said that the cat had a name, Mama Cat, and that though the cat lived under a toll bridge, she was fed and cared for by a toll collector, John Newland. He is expected to testify. Whether the cat was feral is the crucial point in this case. Mr. Stevenson was indicted under a state law that prohibited killing a cat “belonging to another.” Prompted by this case, the law was changed on Sept. 1 to include all cats, regardless of ownership. Ms. Santell argued that because Mr. Newland had named, fed and given the cat bedding and toys, the cat belonged to him and was not feral. Mr. Stevenson’s lawyer, Tad Nelson, admitted in his opening statement that his client went to the San Luis Pass toll bridge with “an intent to kill.” but that he had planned to kill a wild animal that was preying on endangered piping plovers. “This man has dedicated his whole life to birds,” Mr. Nelson said, pointing at Mr. Stevenson. The case has prompted emotional commentary on the Internet. Cat enthusiast blogs have called Mr. Stevenson a “murderous fascist” and a “diabolical monster.” Birding blogs have defended his right to dispense with a “terrible menace” and have set up funds to help pay for his defense. In an interview in a courthouse elevator during a break in the trial, Mr. Stevenson said heatedly that cat fanciers who have condemned him and sent him hateful correspondence “think birds are nothing but sticks.” “This is about wild species disappearing from your planet,” he said, adding, “I did what I had to do.” Testimony followed from police officers and the veterinarian who performed the autopsy on Mama Cat, a white and gray tabby mix. The jurors were shown several photographs of the bloodied cat, reminiscent of an episode of “CSI: Miami.” Pictures of the crime scene showed trays of cat food, blankets and cat toys hanging from strings under the bridge. The .22-caliber rifle Mr. Stevenson used to kill the cat along with his magazine full of Remington hollow-point bullets were also on display. The prosecution and defense wrangled repeatedly about whether witnesses could accurately assess the cat’s state of mind. “He’s not qualified to know what the cat was feeling,” said Mr. Nelson, when a police officer, John P. Bertolino Sr., testified that the cat was in terrible pain when he arrived at the crime scene. The cat died en route to a Humane Society facility. The trial, which is expected to take a week, had few spectators save a handful of bird lovers and cat lovers who sat on opposite sides of the courtroom. One side nodded emphatically at Ms. Santell’s arguments, and the other nodded whenever Mr. Nelson objected. “How people feel about the trial depends on who you talk to,” said Victor Lang, a local historian, adding that bird-watchers and cat fanciers obviously had the strongest views. Though others may argue passionately about whether Mr. Stevenson should be punished, Mr. Lang said he did not have strong feelings about the case. “But you see, I’m a dog person,” he said. “If he had shot a dog, then I’d be more upset.”

Leon Berry Leon "Chu" Berry Berry Berenson

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By November 12, 2007 Ga. Governor Prays for Rain Amid Drought By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 4:04 p.m. ET ATLANTA (AP) -- As Georgia descends deeper into drought, Gov. Sonny Perdue has ordered water restrictions, launched a legal battle and asked President Bush for help. On Tuesday, the governor will call on a higher power. He will join lawmakers and ministers on the steps of the state Capitol to pray for rain. While public prayer vigils might raise eyebrows in other parts of the nation, they are mostly shrugged off in the Bible Belt, where turning to the heavens for help is common and sometimes even politically expedient. ''Christianity has more of a place in the culture here than in some other region,'' said Ray Van Neste, a professor of Christian studies at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. ''And it's only natural, in a way, for the public to pray for rain.'' Perdue won't be the first governor to hold a call for public prayer during the epic drought gripping the Southeast. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley issued a proclamation declaring a week in July as ''Days of Prayer for Rain'' to ''humbly ask for His blessings and to hold us steady in times of difficulty.'' The loudest opposition to Perdue's move has come from the Atlanta Freethought Society, a secular group that is expecting about a dozen of its 125 members to protest at the vigil. ''The governor can pray when he wants to,'' said Ed Buckner, who is organizing the protest. ''What he can't do is lead prayers in the name of the people of Georgia.'' Political heavyweights outside the U.S. are known to occasionally plead to the heavens for rain. In May, Australian Prime Minister John Howard asked churchgoers to pray for rain in hopes of snapping a drought that has devastated crops and bankrupted farmers Down Under. In the U.S., public expressions of faith are often discouraged as a breach of the separation of church and state. Thomas Jefferson, for one, resisted calls for a federal day of prayer. But he was an exception. From George Washington, who declared ''a day of prayer and thanksgiving,'' to Harry Truman, who established a National Day of Prayer, American politicians have not been shy about associating themselves with petitions to the Almighty. With rivers and reservoirs dropping to dangerously low levels across the region, a prayer rally at a high school football stadium in the Georgia town of Watkinsville drew more than 100 worshippers last week, and a gospel concert dedicated to rain attracted hundreds more two weeks ago at an Atlanta church. ''We need to try a different approach,'' said Rocky Twyman, who organized the concert. ''We need to call on God, because what we're doing isn't working. We think that instead of all this fussing and fighting, Gov. Perdue and all these others would come together and pray.'' A Baptist, Perdue has several times mentioned the need for prayer -- along with water conservation -- as the crisis has worsened. Over the summer, he participated in a day of prayer for agriculture at a gathering of the Georgia Farm Bureau. Home

Can't be his "soul justification", because despite his apparent affection for Gene Harris, Dan is quite short of soul.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/books/10...praisal.html?hp Michiko Kakutani's appraisal of Mailer's career.

For much of the ’50s he drifted, frequently drunk or stoned or both, and affected odd accents: British, Irish, gangster, Texan. In 1955, together with two friends, Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, he founded The Village Voice, and while writing a column for that paper he began to evolve what became his trademark style — bold, poetic, metaphysical, even shamanistic at times — and his personal philosophy of hipsterism. It was a homespun, Greenwich Village version of existentialism, which argued that the truly with-it, blacks and jazz musicians especially, led more authentic lives and enjoyed better orgasms. [From the NYT obit] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/books/11mailer.html?hp

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By November 8, 2007 Humdinger of a Project: Tracing Slang to Ireland By COREY KILGANNON Growing up Irish in Queens and on Long Island, Daniel Cassidy was nicknamed Glom. “I used to ask my mother, ‘Why Glom?’ and she’d say, ‘Because you’re always grabbing, always taking things,’” he said, imitating his mother’s accent and limited patience, shaped by a lifetime in Irish neighborhoods in New York City. It was not exactly an etymological explanation, and Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having “unknown origin.” “Glom” seemed to come from the Irish word “glam,” meaning to grab or to snatch. He found the word “balbhán,” meaning a silent person, and he surmised that it was why his quiet grandfather was called the similarly pronounced Boliver. He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word “gimmick” seemed to come from “camag,” meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick. Could “scam” have derived from the expression “’S cam é,” meaning a trick or a deception? Similarly, “slum” seemed similar to an expression meaning “It is poverty.” “Dork” resembled “dorc,” which Mr. Cassidy’s dictionary called “a small lumpish person.” As for “twerp,” the Irish word for dwarf is “duirb.” Mr. Cassidy, 63, began compiling a lexicon of hundreds of Irish-inspired slang words and recently published them in a book called “How the Irish Invented Slang,” which last month won the 2007 American Book Award for nonfiction, and which he is in New York this week promoting. “The whole project started with a hunch — hunch, from the Irish word ‘aithint,’ meaning recognition or perception,” the verbose Mr. Cassidy said in an interview on Monday at O’Lunney’s, a bar and restaurant on West 45th Street. He has worked as a merchant seaman, a labor organizer and a screenwriter, and he lives in San Francisco, where he teaches Irish studies at the New College of California. He pulled out his pocket Irish dictionary and began pointing out words that he said had been Americanized by the millions of Irish immigrants who turned New York into an extension of the Ghaeltacht, or Irish-speaking regions of Ireland. “Even growing up around it, little shards of the language stayed alive in our mouths and came out as slang,” he said, spouting a string of words that sounded straight out of a James Cagney movie. “Snazzy” comes from “snasach,” which means polished, glossy or elegant. The word “scram” comes from “scaraim,” meaning “I get away.” The word “swell” comes from “sóúil,” meaning luxurious, rich and prosperous, and “sucker” comes from “sách úr,” or, loosely, fat cat. There is “Say uncle!” (“anacal” means mercy), “razzmatazz,” and “malarkey,” and even expressions like “gee whiz” and “holy cow” and “holy mackerel” are Anglicized versions of Irish expressions, he said. So are “doozy,” “hokum,” “humdinger,” “jerk,” “punk,” “swanky,” “grifter,” “bailiwick,” “sap,” “mug,” “wallop,” “helter-skelter,” “shack,” “shanty,” “slob,” “slacker” and “knack.” Mr. Cassidy chatted with an Irish-born worker at O’Lunney’s, Ronan O’Reilly, 21, who said he grew up in County Meath speaking Irish. He nodded in agreement as Mr. Cassidy explained that Irish survived in New York as slang. “It was a back-room language, whispered in kitchens and spoken in the saloons,” Mr. Cassidy said. Mr. O’Reilly nodded and said, “Sometimes my friends and I will use it amongst ourselves, sort of like an underground language. “Some of your words here sound like they are taken straight from Irish, even expressions directly translated, like ‘top of the morning’ or ‘thanks a million,’” he continued. “In Ireland, we pick up American slang from TV, like the word ‘buddy.’” Mr. Cassidy laughed. “Buddy,” he contends, actually comes from “bodach,” Irish for a strong, lusty youth. Another employee came up, Lawrence Rapp, 25, who said he was an Irishman from London, where the art of rhyming slang is practiced. “If you have to piddle, you say ‘Jimmy Riddle,’” he said. Mr. Rapp said Londoners often used the word “geezer” to describe people, and Mr. Cassidy pointed out that the term derives from the Irish word “gaosmhar,” or wise person. “Even the word ‘dude’ comes from the Irish word ‘dúid,’ or a foolish-looking fellow, a dolt,” Mr. Cassidy said. “They called the guys dudes who came down to the Five Points section of Manhattan to chase the colleens.” He showed a passage in his book that notes that the Feb. 25, 1883, edition of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the coining of the word “dude,” referring to, among other things, a man who “wears trousers of extreme tightness.” “You dig?” he said. “‘Dig,’ as in ‘tuig,’ or understand.”

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Mailer.html