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Well, this originated in certain professions where it would be particularly easy to steal key information and/or client lists if you had all day to clean out your cubicle. (Or release a virus in a handful of extreme cases.) But it does seem spectacularly useless given that most people take laptops home, back-up email (and take it home), and in general giving them short notice just makes their lives miserable to no end. That said, it would take a solid day to pack up my desk, esp. trying to separate out which files are personal and which belong to the company. Then my bookcase of books and drawer full of CDs! I wouldn't mind having someone do the packing for me.

Very sorry to hear this, but not that surprised. If anything it's more surprising more people haven't been affected yet. My company will probably be ok, esp. as we mostly deal with transportation and there will be more transportation funding from DC soon. My problem is I just don't fit that well with the culture there (and we've lost all of the proposals I have worked on -- not a great sign). I figure if even a handful of people get cut, I will be among them. On the other hand, if we win this big proposal I just wrote that's going in next week, then I would be set for another 18 months. Needless to say, just looking over my shoulder all the time is very stressful, and I am working on several leads to get me out of there. But as everyone knows, this is not the best time to be looking for work.

Bev: We seem to be moving in very similar circles these days. As I mentioned I picked up Apti (though I've generally tried to get CDs rather than downloads for Vijay and Rudresh). I actually went ahead and got a booster last night and picked up three Texier albums on Label Bleu: Mosaic Man Respect (V)ivre I had a few left over so I got Afro-Rock Vol. 1 Special People by Andrew Cyrille I find it kind of interesting that the Texier CDs are almost all on eMusic (and some are quite rare) but the Aldo Romano CDs, many with Texier, are not. In a way, I find this discouraging, though for these particular CDs (Suite Africaine and some others) the liner notes and artwork is pretty essential, so I will try to get a physical copy. (The previous month was a mix of world music and jazz): Diggin' the Crates for Afro Cuban Funk Issa Bagayogo's Mali Koura Butch Morris Dust to Dust Walt Dickerson Life Rays Kenny Drew Trio At the Brewhouse Tommy Flanagan Beyond the Bluebird Bill Perkins Quietly There Andrew Cyrille X-Man Still haven't listened enough to the Bagayogo, but I'll probably get the rest of his albums on eMusic next month (no more booster packs for a while).

He also cancelled an appearance at the Jazz Showcase in early Jan. Sheldonm and I showed up only to find out that he wasn't making the gig. Very sorry I didn't get the chance to hear him previously. Will spin Life and Captain Buckles later today.

Not sure when/if I will get to this. I do have Bolano's The Savage Detectives, and it is "on deck," so to speak. I just finished Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union (particularly appropriate that it is snowing yet again -- one thing that seems weird is that he talks about cold and snow but it just doesn't seem bone chillingly cold -- maybe it takes place in what should be spring or something). I enjoyed it greatly and yet I felt a little let down by the ending. It was almost as if it morphed from a riff on Hammett/Chandler to a neo-noir like Chinatown, specifically in terms of the scale of the conspiracy. Of course, there are also a handful of pratfalls in the middle, and maybe Chabon is riffing on some of the 1970s detective films here (Long Goodbye) that play the genre for laughs a bit. So maybe he is doing a metacritical riff on the detective genre (a little like Joyce's Ulysses is a riff on all English literature). Well, if I ever run into Chabon, I will ask him. Right now I am in the middle of Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl, which is a novel set in rural North Dakota. I'm feeling he has just a bit too much distance from these characters (maybe a bit too snobby about people who never escaped the small towns like he did) and maybe it would have been a bit stronger if he had written it before moving to NYC. But it's an entertaining read so far. And then I should be able to start the Bolano.

If you mean homogenized and dumbed down, then yes. If you mean will it just disappear, I doubt it. It is much easier to force people to listen to the commercials on the radio. Sure more people are moving to internet radio (or Sirius) but I think the cost/hassle factor is high enough that enough people will stick with commercial radio. I think newspapers were particularly vulnerable since they have had a much narrower subscriber base for a couple of decades (far more people just get their news from tv) and their subscribers were precisely the people most likely to move to on-line news distribution.

This seems another example of herd mentality taking over. For decades, advertisers have always aimed at the under 30s, particularly males, as they supposedly had the most disposable income. Not sure that was that true then, and it probably isn't true any longer. But most business models are still built around capturing the youth demographic, and these are the ones completely decimated by the changes in on-line behavior (including a completely casual approach to IPR and downloading as a way of life). Try telling some entertainment exec that they could have a perfectly respectable career going after the 30-50 year old crowd, and they'll think you're bonkers.

Don't have a lot of discipline, but I've generally been able to keep off the booster packs. Speaking of Apti, I managed to score a used copy cheap off of Amazon (or maybe half.com).

Had the same thing happen last night. I was listening to Late Junction and a very cool world music track came on -- something off of Issa Bagayogo's new CD Mali Koura. Well, I am a real sucker for music out of Mali (and kora music more generally), and I thought to see if eMusic had it. They did, and I even had some credits left so I didn't have wait at all. I'm listening to the rest of the album now, and if I really like it, I will probably get the other CDs by this artist (eMusic has 5 total), though that would mean a booster pack or waiting nearly a month!

Well, more negative changes coming to Chicago. I am probably most bummed that the Reader has decided to no longer carry all reviews while a play is in performance, though in this case the review is still on-line, and I guess I will adapt fairly quickly. Still, there was something great about being able to skim through 3, 4, even more pages of theatre reviews to let you know that Chicago was a great theatre town. The Tribune is shifting to a smaller "tabloid" format, though they will allow home delivery subscriber to get the old format. Frankly, this seems like a totally stupid decision. Doesn't this mean twice as much set up time at the printing press? They'll end up forcing the subscribers to get the tabloid format eventually (it's inevitable) so I don't know why they don't bite the bullet now. Sun Times is looking like it will be bankrupt within the year, and is trying to extract more concessions from its workers. Indeed, it is moving copyediting to India! And more and more professional writers are being seduced into giving it away for free: http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stor...hottype/090115/ Again it's just hard to see that this is a sustainable model. What we will be left with when the last major daily goes on-line exclusively? Mostly puff pieces and more blogs about popular culture. Little if any reporting on science, economics, world events. Well, as the saying goes, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

And how are we going to know that the vendor isn't using cheap blanks? I certainly have a handful of CD-Rs where the top layer is peeling around the edges and flaking off, making it difficult for the computer to access the data. It's my experience that CDRs don't last as long as regular CDs, and I think it is kind of crazy to be asked to pay full price for one.

Not that long ago it was £1 = $1.90, so I've actually been ordering a handful of things off of Amazon.co.uk, and even with the shipping it hasn't been too bad. Obviously only for things you just can't find on Amazon.com (which still beats the pants off almost anything in the UK cost-wise).

It's looking more likely that I will be leaving Chicago and most likely ending up in the DC area. As I am pondering this, I thought I would check in with some of the resident experts on the quality of access at the Library of Congress to the academic websites like Jstor, EBSCOhost, Sage, etc. I recently learned that the LOC has access to nearly all of these at the public terminals, but it is kind of case by case on how much access they have (how far back rather), and whether you can print the articles -- and most importantly to me whether you can download them as PDFs. I have download access at Northwestern to nearly all the journals of interest to me (primarily the urban-oriented journals, esp. urban sociology). I am hoping access would be at least as good at LOC, so I can continue to do my research (roughly one or two days a month). Any thoughts from people who use LOC on a regular basis would be great! Eric

Sounds like Larry is onto Plan A. Quick scramble and implement Plan B. (By the way, anyone read Chester Himes' Plan B? Wild apocalpytic stuff.) I did have one of those dreams when I was considerably younger. I dreamed my cat had died. It was incredibly vivid and it took quite a while to wake up and recover.

I have a copy of Milt Jackson's Ain't But a Few of Us Left (Pablo) to give away. Very minor marks on back; plays fine. Unfortunately, the artwork, etc. is damaged, so I will only be shipping the CD. (My inbox is kind of full and I don't have time to empty it, so I will send this to the first person to reply in the thread itself. Thanks.) Eric

I suspect that, just as with transit systems, the physical stuff is expensive, but the salaries/benefits are the vast majority of costs at newspapers, so going on-line isn't going to help much (and will probably be worse as a lot of advertisers won't follow them). Now sure if a bunch of journalism school majors decide to become unpaid interns for life then that model would be sustainable (or we all become potential feeds to CNN -- check out their iReporter stuff some time) but in terms of professional journalism that led to uncovering government or corporate malfeasance, I think that is pretty much over. Most reporters at all but the largest papers just retype PR releases anyway. Yeah, this is the real problem, and as we discussed elsewhere it is absolutely clear that standards are slipping and that wiki is going to be considered "good enough" for anything except graduate level work, and that's some depressing shit.

Yeah, I didn't phrase that right. I meant, can we put on a single cd any Hill material that's on the Mosaic, but hasn't been issued on a single cd, that non-Mosaic owners don't have on a single cd. I believe the answer is no. I don't have the Mosaic, and after gradually collecting the single CDs, I have everything from the box. It has all been issued though many of the individual CDs have gone back OOP. I would like to say (again) that we do owe MC a big thank you for getting out the two Mosaic Selects, and I am particularly glad that they came out before Andrew passed on.

Obviously I am deeply pessimistic, since I see that Americans prefer to avoid depressing news (and certainly don't want to pay for it); shiny happy features are all that will thrive in a post-print news media world. But more fundamentally, the thing about on-line papers is how easy it is to avoid the ads. And if they become more ubiquitous there will be an arms race in Explorer and Firefox on how to bypass them. But let's say for argument's sake that the same quantity of ads in the print media was forced upon on-line readers. So you'd have to scroll through page after page of used cars and bra ads to get to the news content. I can't see that, and I don't think most advertisers do either. And when advertisers do make the switch on-line, they overwhelmingly have been going to Craigslist and other basically free sites. This is the reason that all the free weeklies like the Chicago Reader and the Seattle Weekly are getting thinner and will probably go under soon without those property rental ads (this is certainly true of the Reader, whose parent company has gone bankrupt). And I suspect that the Village Voice's days are numbered as well, based on all the layoffs there.

Yeah, that's what most of us do. However, my impression is that they will never be able to achieve the same advertising revenue from an online only edition. And we all know how well the paying for editorial content experiment went. I personally can't see how they will be able to raise enough revenue to pay for a reasonably-sized stable of beat reporters once they go to on-line only. Same thing with the Associated Press (AP). Even before the financial crisis, 100 papers have taken steps to pull out of AP (including the Chicago Tribune and LA Times). You think Americans are ignorant of world events now, just wait until the local papers stop carrying AP stories. Reporting news (as opposed to blathering about the news and blogging on the backs of newspaper reporting) is expensive, and no one seems willing to pay for it. Once these papers collapse and the AP dissolves, I just don't think the replacements will be adequate. It's the tragedy of the commons writ large.

I hear that Verve has perfected their remastering techniques so that formerly lost sounds, such as the engineer coughing in the booth, have been imprinted on the sessions, so they now sound exactly as they did going down. Fingers crossed that MC will convince Blue Note to follow suit. Personally I am looking forward to the RVG2 (that's Rudy-squared) series to follow.

Yeah, I ran into that a few times. You are generally better off running the VHS outputs into a computer, but sometimes you run into Macrovision!. Finally watching the inputs directly on the computer screen, I could figure out macrovision. The whole picture goes bright, then dark, then bright in an endless loop. VHS players can cope with this in playback mode, but they are supposed to be prevented from dubbing over/copying anything with this pattern. Most of the commercial software packages for your computer have built in functions that prevent the recording of Macrovisioned inputs, though like most things there are hacks around it. I even bought a gizmo that you insert between the VHS output and the computer input that is supposed to run interference and "remove" Macrovision, but it only works about half the time.

Borders was having a fairly impressive in-store sale today (30% off all CDs), and I picked up 4 - Gateway, Balladyna, Sargasso Sea and Dave Holland's Extension. I don't think they had the Towners in stock. So I was pretty consistent, but I decided I wasn't that into solo sax (Private City) and that Animato sounded way too New Agey. If I have a chance, I will check out one other Borders to see if they have the Towner titles, and then I think I will be done.

So has anyone been able to get a line on ordering the Grappelli The nearness of you in the US? Dustygroove will probably be the most reasonable when they actually get it in stock, but no guarantee when that will be. I came close to pulling the trigger at Amazon.fr but they wanted 10 Euros shipping, which I thought was a bit steep. (Maybe with the base price being so low it still works out to be reasonable, but if there is a US distributor I'd rather go that way.) I did *exactly* the same thing! Looked at Amazon.fr and decided the shipping was too steep, so I'm waiting for my email notification from Dustygroove that they have it in. I just have to have patience, I guess--not my most notable quality! greg mo I did notice that the shipping didn't go up appreciably when adding 2 or 3 copies of the Grappelli to my cart. I figure I'll wait until spring to see if Dusty gets it in and, if not, then perhaps see if a few folks on the board want to split the shipping. Even after redistributing within the US, there would still be some savings. It works out to about 13 Euros (each) for 2 copies and I think 11 Euros for 3.

Agreed - I'd forgotten about that record until the Randy Brecker piece reminded me. Played it last night and Freddie is scary! Not familiar with this, but it turns out that this album -- and the Keystones -- are on eMusic, so I'll be checking them out today.

So has anyone been able to get a line on ordering the Grappelli The nearness of you in the US? Dustygroove will probably be the most reasonable when they actually get it in stock, but no guarantee when that will be. I came close to pulling the trigger at Amazon.fr but they wanted 10 Euros shipping, which I thought was a bit steep. (Maybe with the base price being so low it still works out to be reasonable, but if there is a US distributor I'd rather go that way.)