Dr. Rat

I expect a very very good game, but I voted Spurs. I think they're really the more talented team, and I expect they'll show it tonight, esp. with their being home. No disrespect to the Pistons, though. Always an admirer of Larry Brown coached teams--I just don't think they've quite got it this year. I look forward to the game, and being a Sixers fan (save your expressions of sympathy) I am relatively neutral. As long as the game is good. --eric

Yeah, I'm sure everyone is busy. But one does begin to wonder whether Russell is more disliked than inaccurate. --eric

What, Plainfield is South Plainfield? I did read the thread. In that context (or any context), my post was obviously not intended as exhaustive directions. But, hey, if you wanna play nit-picky, go for it. I'm sure I misspelled something, too. --eric

Straight down Rt. 1. A beautiful place! I used to live in new brunswick, so I'm allowed to make fun! --eric ← Plainfield is not New Brunswick and isn't on Rt. 1. ← Damn. Plainfield's not New Brunswick. It isn't South Plainfield, either. But anyhow, as other folk's detailed directions point out, if you come down 1, you will find signs for South Plainfield which lies a very, very far 10 minutes to the west.

Straight down Rt. 1. A beautiful place! I used to live in new brunswick, so I'm allowed to make fun! --eric

Doctor, definitely. Some guy cleaned my clock at soccer one night and tore my trapezius (sp?) muscle, which hurt very bad. Stupid me didn't go to the doctor so I got three days of incresing pain and pulled all my vertebrae out of whack scrunching up. But the DO straightened out my back, gave me some wonderful pain pills and muscle relaxants. Along with a few days rest I was mostly recovered by the time the drugs ran out. Hopefully, you can be another miracle of modern pharmaceutica if only you'll go see a qualified gatekeeper. --eric

Nah, it's actually the same as the answer to the question, "why does the dog owner lick his balls?" Because he saw the dog do it, and figured even though the odds of success were highly unlikely, it wouldn't hurt anything to try... ← You could probably do it pretty easy if the dog was distracted by something that kept him still for a while, like a bone maybe. --eric

Burl Ives!

Well, I'd bet that if this is the last straw (which I doubt) Ben Ratliff will go down as perhaps the worst but deifnitely the last jazz writer employed by the Times. The reason why he's there in the first place is because respectability amongst angry letter writers means very little to them. They're obviously looking for someone who might develop a bit more interest and enthusiasm in the subject matter. A pretty obvious last ditch effort, in my opinion. --eric

This stuff is terrible for you, but if I buy it, I eat it all soon as I get home. Therefore I never buy it. But I guess its still my favorite. --eric

I might check him out since majority of world's big systems are complex systems but at first glance it looks like 99% is over my head. One funny thing is, he has these gorgantuan equations and at the end he says something like "Note to statisticians: Sorry I am being simplistic" ← Yes, some of it is not for your average bear, but he also writes intelligently about understandable things like evolution and politics as well. --eric

Next you'll be telling me that practically all statements beginning "There are two types of . . ." are highly dubious! --eric

That serrated stage edge was a bad idea! --eric

Personally, I was intrigued by Hippo, lost interest, then started to get intrigued again lately. Live at the Quick and Ten from Little Worlds, I'd say, are well worth checking out and are reason to hope that the elements he's fusing together can be meshed well. I very much like the "world music" musicians he's been working in lately--they give the feel of the music a much more organic texture than it had on early flecktone efforts. --eric

This is a blog that I've found to be really fascinating and enlightening: Three-toed Sloth By a youngish fellow named Cosma Shalizi who is a post-doc at the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan and has also studied at the Santa Fe Institute. Aside from knowing math, science and complexity theory really well, he's also generally well-read and really well-plugged into the scientific end of the blogosphere. --eric

This one? ← Yes, that does look familiar. So Laos, not Thailand. --eric

The record I was talking about is on Nimbus, which I think helped inspire the Jah Wobble "Molam Dub." http://www.30hertzrecords.com/molamdub.htm --eric

I rember this great disc that came out a few years back called Molam Lao, which had a bunch of guys mostly from Thailand, I beleive, playing these huge harmonica/accordion-like instruments on these very structured, minimalist but dance-like tunes (as I fondly but hazily recall). Really cool stuff. We actually got loads of play from the late night free-form people who usually play little else but rock and elctronic. --eric ← A yes, the khene. I once had a car acident to the tune of the CD, Jah Wobble - Molam Dub ← Yes! the khene! I hope you (and the record) came out OK. --eric

I rember this great disc that came out a few years back called Molam Lao, which had a bunch of guys mostly from Thailand, I beleive, playing these huge harmonica/accordion-like instruments on these very structured, minimalist but dance-like tunes (as I fondly but hazily recall). Really cool stuff. We actually got loads of play from the late night free-form people who usually play little else but rock and elctronic. --eric

In respect to the tiger, where is your belly button? --eric

A friend of mine got the Lowenbrau lion on his arm. --eric

Just stay where we can see you now, OK? --eric

We've added it here, and taken one track at a time, my complaints about the album fade in significance, which I often find to be the case--albums I wouldn't listen to straight through on a wage are OK or even good when they represent a bit of a change of pace. --eric

Some opinions here. --eric

Just reading this at lunch. The review struck me as kind of strange, not just in terms of the Seymour's tone vs. that of most folks around here, but in that this guy seems intersted in talking about Crouch on some basis that gets beyond his abrasiveness and physical/intellectual pugilism . . . but then he doesn't At which point, the reader will be tempted to shout, "Awww, man! Why'd you have to go there? You were doing fine up till then." This isn't the last time the stained-yellow underwear comes up, and it's at such points and others strewn throughout the book that one's threshold for Crouch's freewheeling attack gets pressed to the breaking point. Still, when Crouch is focused on the task at hand, especially in the title essay's slow-hand evisceration of David Shields's Black Planet, it is fearsomely thrilling to behold. To Crouch, Shields's highly subjective account of the 1994-95 Seattle SuperSonics season constitutes one of the bad things that happen when good writers grasp for authenticity or, as Crouch sees it, the notion of "being--or not being--what [shields] calls 'cool.'" Reading Shields confess his fascination, from his relatively secure, petit-bourgeois white standpoint, with flamboyant, often belligerent and wealthy black basketball superstars like Gary Payton, Crouch finds that Shields is avoiding, far more than confronting, his own bullshit. As far as Shields is concerned, Crouch writes: You probably have to read both the "Artificial White Man" essay and "Blues in More Than One Color: The Films of Quentin Tarantino" more than once to figure out why Crouch thinks Tarantino is a lot "cooler"--more authentic?--in his engagement with the black psyche than Shields. The Tarantino essay does cover a lot of real estate. (It's a raw, rambling and altogether remarkable virtuoso solo that started out, Crouch writes, as a letter responding to Daniel Mendelsohn's dismissal of Tarantino's Kill Bill in The New York Review of Books.) It might help to skip ahead to the part of the essay that deals with Tarantino's overlooked Jackie Brown (1997), which gets its most thorough and incisive appreciation in these pages. Crouch correctly sees that what had been hyped and is still seen in some quarters as Tarantino's homage to the "blaxploitation" movies of the 1970s was in fact a sly, humane subversion of those knockabout thrillers. Crouch's swaggering belligerence may sell tickets to the chattering classes. But critics should always be judged finally on what and how they love. And in the Tarantino essay and his appreciations elsewhere in the book of Jorge Luis Borges, Danzy Senna, Saul Bellow and ZZ Packer, his enthusiastic passion feels so genuine that it further diminishes the things and trends he despises.