Chrome

I was lucky enough to find a copy of "Live at the Royal Roost" at the ol' Borders Outlet a few months ago ... highly recommended. According to AMG, Dinah Washington and Anita O'Day, both of whom sing on the disc, hadn't otherwise recorded w/Basie. It's a recording of live radio performances from 1948, but the sound is really pretty good and the band just, well, rocks.

NASA: Liquid water once on Mars Evidence red planet was once 'soaking wet' By Marsha Walton CNN Tuesday, March 2, 2004 Posted: 2:30 PM EST (1930 GMT) (CNN) -- Mission accomplished. NASA scientists say the Mars rovers have found what they were looking for: Hard evidence that the red planet was once "soaking wet." "We have concluded the rocks here were once soaked in liquid water," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University. He's the principal investigator for the science instruments on Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit. "The second question we've tried to answer: Were these rocks altered by liquid water? We believe definitively, yes," said Squyres. Squyres and other NASA officials made the announcement at NASA headquarters in Washington, after several days of giving tantalizing hints that something significant had been discovered. "Three and a half years ago, in July 2000, we were on stage here to talk about sending two rovers to get evidence of past water. NASA and its international partners have turned those dreams to reality," said Ed Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space science. Scientists used instruments on board the golf cart-sized rovers to study the composition of the rocks and soil on the planet. The rocks' physical appearance, plus the detection of sulfates, make the case for a watery history, and more important, an environment that could have been hospitable to life. Spirit and Opportunity were sent to opposite sides of the planet with the possibility of investigating different types of terrain. Spirit, the first rover to arrive on January 3, landed near the Gusev Crater, which may once have held a lake. But geologists and other researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, were thrilled when they saw the possibilities surrounding Opportunity, which landed three weeks later. It landed inside a small crater in the Meridiani Planum, one of the flattest places on the planet. And its landing site was within driving distance for the spacecraft to reach an exposed slice of bedrock. Since its landing January 25, Opportunity has used the same tools as a human field geologist would to determine the chemical contents of the rocks. Using an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a device that can identify chemical elements, scientists have identified a high concentration of sulfur in the bedrock. Another instrument on board, a Moessbauer spectrometer, has detected an iron sulfate mineral known as jarosite. From their knowledge of rocks on earth, scientists say rocks with as much salt as this Mars rock either formed in water, or had a long exposure to water after they were formed. The scientists say these rocks could have formed in an acidic lake or even a hot springs. Scientists say the case for a watery past is further strengthened by the pictures taken by the rovers' panoramic cameras and its microscopic imager. One target rock, named "El Capitan," is filled with random pockmarks. Geologists say a texture like that comes from sites where salt crystals have formed in rocks that have sat in salt water. Scientists say they have gained other clues from the physical appearance of the rocks. They see a pattern called "crossbedding," which is often the result of wind or water moving across the rock's surface. The cost of the two rover missions is about $820 million dollars. With solar panels and lithium-ion battery systems aboard, each rover is expected to function and communicate with earth for about 90 Mars days, known as "sols." That's equivalent to 92 earth days.

I recently picked up "Tough Tenors" with Davis/Griffin ... it's definitely fantastic ... and some more for the Cookbooks!

You know, Ghost, they now have yogurt-filled Poptarts ...

Naughty Rhymes: What Did Jack & Jill Do on the Hill? Tue Mar 2, 2004 08:53 AM ET By Sophie Walker LONDON (Reuters) - Bed-hopping royals. Religious hatred. Teenage sex. Obesity warnings. Tabloid headlines? No, Britain's favorite nursery rhymes. Parents may throw up their hands in horror but a new book says that playground ditties are drenched in sex, death and violence and prove that many 21st century concerns have been around for a long time. "Some were clearly adult rhymes which were sung to children because they were the only rhymes an adult knew. Others were deliberately created as a simple way to tell children a story or give them information," Chris Roberts, author of "Heavy Words Lightly Thrown" told Reuters. "Religion, sex, money and social issues are all common themes and although there is a tendency to look at history through the concerns of the present it was something I was led to rather than sought to do," Roberts said. As an example, one of Britain's most popular nursery rhymes, "Jack and Jill Went up the Hill" is according to Roberts the tale of two young people losing their virginity, Jill possibly becoming pregnant and the regrets that come later. "The interesting bit is that, having successfully 'lost his crown,' it's Jack who runs off rapidly, probably to tell his mates what happened," Roberts said. In an alternative second verse the sexual association of the rhyme becomes even more blatant, Roberts added. Instead of his head, Jack has a different part of his anatomy patched up with vinegar and brown paper. GOLDEN AGE Although some nursery rhymes appear to have their origins in the Middle Ages, their golden age was the period between the Tudor monarchs and the Stuarts. This was Britain's formative age, says Roberts, as it covered among many other things the Act of Union, which brought together Scotland and England, the Civil War and the growth of Empire and trading. The Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible were published in English rather than Latin and caused even deeper rifts between Protestants and Catholics These were heady topics to cope with, so why not keep it short and tell it in rhyme?" Roberts said. His book grew from research for a series of walking tours around London. Some rhymes like Oranges and Lemons -- a guide to the City of London which also doubles as a saucy wedding song -- cropped up obviously. In other cases geographical research revealed social history such as the fact that prostitutes in the Southwark area of London (where licensed brothels existed) were called 'geese'. Thus the rhyme "Goosie, goosie gander/Where do you wander?/Upstairs and downstairs/and in my lady's chamber" can be read as alluding to the spread of venereal disease -- known as 'goose bumps' because of the swelling. It also tackles a dispute between King Henry VIII and the Catholic church, which owned the land upon which the brothels were operating and profited hugely. From "Mary, Mary quite contrary" and its references to the 'cockles' (cuckolds) believed to be in the promiscuous court of Mary, Queen of Scots to "The Grand Old Duke of York" -- about a former Duke's inept military strategy against the French -- sly digs at princes and popes alike were commonplace, Roberts's book reveals. "Georgy Porgy pudding and pie/Kissed the girls and made them cry" has been interpreted as gossip about a supposedly gay courtier George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham 1592-1628, but more likely was a warning to young men that overeating puts the ladies off. NEW ERA OF FOOTBALL LULLABIES? Increased freedom of speech, literacy and communication, eventually did away with the need for allegorical rhymes. Then came the Victorians, who viewed childhood as an innocent state where 'adult sights' should be hidden. "During the 19th century the rhymes were increasingly written up, illustrated and sold as collections for children. They became more accessible, but also less potent," said Roberts. Many of today's children's songs are deliberately composed as such, making the roots of the next generation's nursery rhymes more anodyne. However, the need for "tribal chanting" as Roberts puts it, is still present, and most obvious in football songs, which he suggests could be tomorrow's lullabies. "They are about the only thing that are 'composed' anonymously and known and sung by thousands of people," he said. "Pop songs still occasionally eulogize celebrities and make social comments but their authorship is known whereas football songs are, in a sense, true folk songs belonging to a tribe of people rather than an individual," Roberts added. "Words change their meaning and associations alter over time so if the person singing the song doesn't know the real (or even perceived) meaning of the song it can be fitted to other uses," he said. "I do know fathers who croon football songs, that are after all rarely complex tunes, to help their children sleep."

I eat the brown sugar cinnamon ones about once a week ... I haven't noticed a change in taste so much as a change in texture ... they're "drier" to me, if that makes sense. Has anyone tried the Spongebob Poptarts yet? I got a box for my kids ... they're flavored with some bizarre pseudo-fruit substance ... "Bubbleberry" or something. Absolutely revolting.

From Slate: A Riff for Sidney Bechet By Stanley Moss Posted Tuesday, March 2, 2004, at 7:42 AM PT That night in Florence, forty-five years ago, I heard him play like "honey on a razor," he could get maple syrup out of a white pine, out of a sycamore, out of an old copper beech. I remember that summer Michelangelo's marble naked woman's breasts, reclining Dawn's nipples— exactly like the flesh I ached for. How could Dawn behind her clouds hurt me? The sunrise bitch was never mine. He brought her down. In twelve bars of burnt sugar, she was his if he wanted her.

Oops ... sorry 'bout that ... but thanks for the answer.

Did anyone see Sting on the Oscars last night? He sang with Alison Krause and he was playing something that looked like, well, I don't know what, but he wore it like a guitar on a strap and used his right hand to spin a handle reminiscent of an organ grinder/jack-in-a-box crank.

Not really ... we could all be living in the Matrix! And try proving we're not.

Yep, once again proving piety and being Christlike have nothing in common.

Facts are simple and facts are straight Facts are lazy and facts are late Facts all come with points of view Facts don't do what I want them to Facts just twist the truth around Facts are living turned inside out Facts are getting the best of them Facts are nothing on the face of things Facts don't stain the furniture Facts go out and slam the door Facts are written all over your face Facts continue to change their shape --Talking Heads

I saw the one where they tried to get Squeeze back together ... it is pretty fascinating stuff. ... and I still bring out "Special Beat Service" every now and then!

No blame meant, Jazzbo ... I just meant to point up the fact that devout/pious/etc. often goes hand in hand with some not very Christlike behavior.

Like the pious and devout Rev. Farrakhan?

Are you thinking of "The Uses of Enchantment" by Bettelheim? I've got that on my bookshelf, waiting to be read, but from what I remember of the dust jacket it sounds kind of like that.

Serious question from a non-Christian: Exactly how "pre-ordained" was it? I mean, I know there is a lot of debate regarding free will, etc., in religion ... how do Christians who believe in free will reconcile that with the idea this was all pre-ordained?

Thinking about standards brought to mind the incredible Cole Porter ... what a way with words! This is the first one that comes to mind for me. Mahatma Gandhi-Napoleon Brandy always kills me. You're the top, you're Mahatma Gandhi, You're the top! you're Napoleon brandy, You're the purple light, of a summer night in Spain, You're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary, You're cellophane!

Goya

But what does that get you? A lot of people are affected emotionally by Kenny G., too. Objectively counting people's opinions doesn't change the fact that it is still opinion.

That guy kicked some serious ass ...

... and he was great on the Mod Squad, too!

What do you make of the "criticism" that chess really comes down to kind of a brute mathematical force kind of thing?

I'm more interested in Bobby Fischer as a nutcase than I am of chess per se, but either way, this was pretty interesting. It's from the New Yorker. GAME THEORY by LOUIS MENAND Spassky vs. Fischer revisited. Chess is not friendly to prose. Chess is, after all, a sport, but there is almost no way to convey what’s exciting about it to people who are not themselves deep students of the game. “Then, on move 21, came Black’s crusher: a6!”—totally opaque, as are references to the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense, the Giuoco Piano, and the Queen’s Gambit Declined. You can ignore the technical stuff and write about powerful queenside attacks, hammering rook assaults, intense positional struggle, and so on; but the truth is that the game is the technical stuff. A move that counts as dramatic is a move disclosed after an exhaustive analysis of all other possible moves, and the analysis can take forty minutes or more. Then someone reaches out and pushes a little piece of wood two inches. To readers who have not pondered the alternatives themselves, and who already think that the huddles in football take too long, it’s hard to communicate the thrill. There is also the artificial-intelligence problem, and it’s not trivial. If the “best” move is simply the result of multiple calculations, why isn’t the best chess player the one whose brain is most like a computer? Why isn’t rooting for a chess player like rooting for a microchip? Commentators talk about a player’s daring or originality; but a daring or original move is worthless if it’s not also, from a strictly computational point of view, the optimal move—in which case, a computer could have made it. Since there is so little to look at otherwise, the players’ styles and personalities come to seem important to describe. But what does style or personality have to do with it, really? An activity this resistant to the usual blandishments of sports journalism attracts public attention only when something besides chess seems to be at stake. No other chess match has ever come close to attracting the kind of attention that the 1972 world-championship match, between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, did. It was advertised as “the Match of the Century.” It inspired a pop song, “The Ballad of Bobby Fischer,” performed by Joe Glazer and his Fianchettoed Bishops. Fischer’s face was on the cover of Life, the Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, and Der Spiegel. Life reported on the match. Arthur Koestler wrote about it. So did George Steiner, for The New Yorker. Books were published about Fischer’s most famous games. People who knew nothing about chess history started referring casually to Fischer’s queen sacrifice on the seventeenth move of his Grünfeld Defense against Donald Byrne in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Tournament in 1956, when Fischer was thirteen. The three American networks sent a correspondent each to Iceland to cover the match. The Prime Minister of Bangladesh allowed to journalists that he was a chess enthusiast. In Belgrade, the positions were shown on a screen in the public square. The games were covered as news in Italy, Great Britain, Argentina. Many books were published about the match. A new account, “Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time” (Ecco; $24.95), has been written by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, whose book about a quarrel between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, “Wittgenstein’s Poker,” was popular when it came out, a couple of years ago. The authors seem to have started off in the belief that since chess, a game they give no indication of knowing a great deal about, is normally an esoteric pastime, the frenzy surrounding the Fischer-Spassky match must have been due to something besides the chess. Both Fischer and Spassky had been on the international chess scene for some time when they met, in Reykjavík, to play for the world title. Spassky had won the crown in 1969, by beating his fellow-Soviet Tigran Petrosian. Petrosian had been the world champion since 1963, the successor to a line of Soviet champions going back to 1948, when Mikhail Botvinnik took the title that had been held by Alexander Alekhine (a Russian, but an anti-Soviet exile). Fischer had qualified for the match by winning six games in a row, with no draws, against Mark Taimanov, a Soviet player, and six games in a row against Bent Larsen, a Danish grand master regarded as the best non-Soviet player after Fischer, and then beating Petrosian by winning five of the nine games they played (three were draws). Fischer had lost one game in three matches against the strongest players, apart from one, in the world. It was said to have been the greatest run in the history of the sport. President Nixon sent a congratulatory letter. Fischer had never beaten Spassky head to head. Plus, he had a distinctly borderline personality. From an early age, he had been the chess-world equivalent of a hotel-room-destroying rock star. At nearly every tournament, he complained about the accommodations, he complained about the lighting, he complained about the audience. Most of all, he complained about the money. He was apparently of the view that, since he behaved like a rock star, he ought to be paid like one. We are not talking about vast sums. When Spassky won five thousand dollars in a tournament in Santa Monica, the rest of the Soviet chess establishment was sick with resentment. Fischer’s financial demands set off a bidding war for the honor of hosting the world-championship match. Iceland, to its subsequent regret, emerged the winner, after Belgrade, concerned that Fischer wouldn’t show up, pulled out—and, even then, a British tycoon named James Slater had to double the prize money, to a quarter of a million dollars, before Fischer could be induced to play. (The winner got roughly two-thirds.) Fischer stalled: about to board a plane for Iceland, he fled Kennedy Airport and hid out in a friend’s house in Queens. The start of the match had to be postponed. Henry Kissinger phoned Fischer to talk him into going. At some point during all this, the rest of the planet got hooked on the story. One possible reason for the world’s interest was the Cold War, and for most of their book Edmonds and Eidinow play up the Cold War aspects of the match. This makes it a little surprising when, at the end, they discount the whole idea. They’re perfectly right to do so. American officials, on their side, regarded Fischer mainly with fear and loathing. Kissinger’s intervention seems to have been motivated by personal interest in the game, rather than by grand strategy. The State Department informed the American chargé d’affaires in Reykjavík to spend no government resources on Fischer’s behalf, and the chargé’s own deepest desire was to get Fischer off the island as quickly as possible. Publicly, sentiment in the United States was divided on Fischer, but more or less the way it was divided, during the same period, on Muhammad Ali or, an even better comparison, Evel Knievel. He was definitely a rude fellow, but maybe there was something cool about him. He was tall (six-three); he was physical at the board, snatching pieces off it when he captured them; he wore glitter-green suits with padded shoulders. He was plausibly a certain type of American antihero: rebel, exact cause to be determined. And, on the other side, Spassky was far from a typical Soviet-era athlete. He was a patriot, but a Russian patriot. He hated the Bolsheviks and had little respect for the Soviet system (though he was careful to extract the rewards to which he believed his accomplishments as a sportsman entitled him). It gave him pleasure to ignore advice offered by Soviet officials, and in Iceland he made his seconds and other handlers miserable with frustration by his insistence on doing things his own way. He later married, for the third time, and moved to Paris. Fischer hated the Soviets—“Commie cheaters,” as he called them—but his understanding of the philosophical differences between the two sides was not great. He thought that Soviet players cheated in tournaments by agreeing to easy draws when they played against each other in order to preserve their energy for games against foreigners, and he wanted to use Iceland to take his revenge. He was not thinking like a diplomat. He was thinking like a high-school student. The incentive to write another book on the Fischer-Spassky match seems to have been the opportunity to see government documents from the period—F.B.I. files on Fischer and Soviet files on Spassky and on the match itself. There are a lot of files, but they don’t tell us much. The F.B.I. was interested, for many years, in Fischer’s parents, whom it suspected of being Communists, but this interest does not seem to have had any effect on Fischer himself or on the championship. The K.G.B. took more interest in the match than the F.B.I. did, though we have to remember that K.G.B. agents were playing for Spassky mainly the role that the cadre of lawyers and other advisers surrounding Fischer played for the American. They were protecting their client. This involved nutty chores like taking the fruit juice Spassky was being served in Iceland to Moscow for chemical analysis, to see whether he was being doped, and x-raying Fischer’s chair, looking for transmission devices. Edmonds and Eidinow speculate vigorously, but they can’t find any proof that the K.G.B., or anyone on Fischer’s team, did anything underhanded. They also conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that official Soviet involvement in the match was not unusually intense, and that the press coverage was entirely non-ideological. This was, they properly note, a period of superpower détente. In spite of a good deal of analogy-hunting (“as the match ground on, Nixon became engaged in his own desperate game of chess making move after move to save his presidential skin,” they observe, to no particular purpose), the authors do not come up with a novel explanation for why the match was the worldwide sensation it was. Since Edmonds and Eidinow essentially finesse the games themselves, avoiding technical analyses and relying mostly on the characterizations of various experts, there is not much left to the story but tears and rage. In every respect but one, the match was a fiasco—“a world-shatteringly silly event,” as one participant, a lawyer for Fischer, later put it. Fischer arrived late for the first game and lost it when he took a poisoned pawn, one of the most elementary mistakes in chess. (He took an exposed pawn with his bishop, which was trapped after his opponent’s next move.) Fischer didn’t show up at all for the second game, and forfeited it. He insisted that the third game be played not in the exhibition hall, which the Icelandic Chess Federation had arranged expressly for the match, hoping to recover some of its costs by charging admission, but in a small room at the back of the building. Spassky, claiming indifference to location, agreed, and Fischer promptly destroyed him. Spassky never really recovered. The match was returned to the main hall, but by the tenth game Fischer had come back from 0-2 to take a 61/2- 31/2 lead. (Draws counted for half a point.) He coasted from there, winning the match by four points and filing abusive protests almost up until the last game. Spassky had played as though he were in a fog for the better part of the match, and phoned in his resignation. Fischer was late to the closing ceremonies; when he was handed his check, he opened it and examined it on the spot. During the speeches, which he ignored, he pulled out a pocket set and showed Spassky where he had gone wrong in the final game. Though a percentage of television revenues had been one of Fischer’s demands before the match started, the presence of television cameras in the hall became one of his most persistent causes of complaint. (It was on this ground that the third game was played in a back room.) An independent producer named Chester Fox had managed to get exclusive rights to film the proceedings. He was, on Edmonds and Eidinow’s account, a persistent character, but he was no match for Fischer, and he ended up with nothing. The members of Fischer’s entourage, possibly anticipating a windfall if their man won and went on to sign major book and appearance contracts, received nothing for their service. These included an Icelandic policeman, who signed on as Fischer’s bodyguard, and even worked for him, in the United States, after the match. When he left to go back to Iceland, the American Chess Federation gave him five hundred dollars, which Edmonds and Eidinow say works out to three dollars a day for the time he had spent with Fischer. Back in Moscow, Spassky and his team were subjected to a humiliating postmortem, and Spassky’s travel privileges were suspended (a standard Soviet response to failure in international competition). Spassky had apparently believed that he was capable of intuiting a way to beat Fischer during the match. What he realized after the third game, he later said, was that Fischer was “an animal.” He hadn’t calculated that variation. After Reykjavík, and a few grudging public appearances, Fischer went off the radar screen. He refused to sign any of the contracts offered by publishers and others, and he declined to defend his championship against the next challenger, Anatoly Karpov. He was deposed in absentia in 1974. In 1992, he turned up in Yugoslavia for a rematch with Spassky; the competitors proved to be well past their primes. Fischer’s presence in Yugoslavia at a time of civil war there violated an executive order; he spat publicly on the letter warning him not to play, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Edmonds and Eidinow say it is still outstanding. Fischer gave an interview on a Philippine radio station on September 11, 2001, in which he said that “America got what it deserved.” He has become a vociferous anti-Semite. In the end, he revealed himself to be not a rebel or a mad genius but—what was fairly obvious all along—a delusional paranoid. His behavior in Iceland was not psychological warfare (though it may have had the effect of psychological warfare). It was simply his way of dealing with reality. “I don’t believe in psychology,” he told a reporter when he was holed up in Queens while Spassky waited in Iceland. “I believe in good moves.” So, evidently, did Spassky, who never blamed the chaos that seemed to accompany his opponent for his own meltdown at the board. Edmonds and Eidinow quote a chess-playing psychologist, William Hartston: “Chess is not something that drives people mad; chess is something that keeps mad people sane.” The one happy effect of the 1972 championship match was the interest it excited in chess. This was due partly to Fischer’s antic behavior, but mostly to television coverage of the games themselves. The BBC devoted a weekly program to the match which attracted a million viewers; in the United States, PBS covered every play of every game, and the program made a star out of an ex-sociology lecturer named Shelby Lyman, an improbable but charismatic television personality. Still, after the truth about Fischer became accepted, American enthusiasm for international chess faded. How many of the people who followed the Fischer-Spassky match as though it were one of the great soap operas of all time even know who the current world champion is? His name, for the record, is Vladimir Kramnik.

Report: Woman dies watching 'Passion' Thursday, February 26, 2004 Posted: 10:55 AM EST (1555 GMT) CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- A woman died of an apparent heart attack Wednesday while watching the climactic crucifixion scene in "The Passion of the Christ" at a morning showing in Wichita, Kansas, a television station reported. The film was stopped and a nurse in attendance went to the woman's side, KAKE-TV in Wichita reported. "It was the highest emotional part of the movie," a spokeswoman for the station said. A crew from the station was at the special showing, which was sponsored by the ClearChannel Radio chain. The Wichita Eagle newspaper, on its Web site, identified the woman as Peggy Scott, 56, a sales manager for two local radio stations. Employees at KAKE-TV said they knew the woman as Peggy Law, adding they did not think she had any pre-existing health problems. The woman was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, where a spokesman would only say she had been attending a movie. The county coroner's office said an autopsy would be performed. Mel Gibson's film, which opened Wednesday, has been both criticized and praised for its violent, bloody portrayal of Christ's final hours.