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Sal, I'm going to disagree with you here. What I've seen is that every week, the Defense has gotten worse, whether through injuries or peaking too early or what have you. I don't think they've played playoff-caliber football in four or five weeks, even when the games meant something. Sure, I hope Grossman bounces back, but I'm not counting on it. Now maybe he will get to be a bit more reliable in a couple of years, but it's been tough not knowing which quarterback is showing up to play.

It hurts, but I have to agree with you. The wheels have fallen off the Bear's little orange wagon. Can somebody find who body-snatched the team that played the first half of the season, because these guys are just imposters...

My wife stayed up to watch this (still on London time), but I believe she wishes she hadn't. I'm sure you were better off at home.

I think I still have that Smithsonian set on cassette. At this point, I would imagine I have just about everything in a more complete form. The first major box set, where I actually saved up for it, was the Monk on Riverside set. This was something I bought during my first "real," post-college job.

DMG now has it at $22. Must not have realised it was a double CD. Same price at Dusty Groove. Buying it direct from Nimbus West appears to be the best deal if you live in the US in order to get the free shipping.

A lot of the stuff I discovered in 2006 was actually from 2005, or I am just hearing advance tracks and the albums will hit in 2007. Perhaps my favorite non-jazz album was Ali Farka Toure's Savane, closely followed by Toumani Diabate's Boulevard de l'Independance. I also liked Rachid Taha's Diwan 2 and Tartit's Abacabok. I just picked up Echu Mingua by Angá Diaz, sparked by the cut "A Love Supreme" on the World Circuit Presents sampler. If the rest of the album is half as good, then I will be very happy indeed. I liked about half of the Gnarls Barkley album; the other half - meh. Personally I thought the Red Hot Chili Pepper's double CD was a big let-down. I've almost completely stopped listening to rock/pop that is more recent than 1998, so I just am not following any of it. That's ok -- it means more money to spend on jazz CDs.

Yes, but she will probably need an additional adapter just to plug into the wall sockets. They aren't that expensive, and she should be able to buy one in the airport on the way out. Making trans-Atlantic calls on a cell phone is incredibly expensive no matter what your plan, so keep those calls short!

Mostly world music this month -- Classic Titles - Les Ambassadeurs Classic Titles - Orchestra Baobab Diwan 2 - Rachid Taha (they also have Diwan and Live in Medina!) Tartit - Abacabok Tinariwen - Radio Tisdas Tinariwen - Amassakoul (hope they get the new release that is supposed to be out in March!) Oumou Sangaré - Moussolou Khaled - Sahra Aimee Mann - One More Drifter in the Snow (couple of the new songs) They have so much amazing stuff, particularly for world music labels. Unfortunately, World Circuit isn't on eMusic. In past months, I downloaded pretty much everything they had by Amadou et Mariam. One of these upcoming months, I'll just dl all the Fela CDs (I only have a handful currently). And I'll probably dl the new Tom Waits collection after that.

To me a fair price is $0.25 to $0.50 per track, given the quality and the lack of extras. EMusic falls in this category or is better depending on your subscription. The others don't, and I have been extremely reluctant to get anything from iTunes or Verve for that matter. It doesn't help that they generally withhold tracks from shorter albums, so that you have to pay $9.99 even if it is only 6 or 7 tracks. To me, that is unethical, although I suppose if they also routinely offered 18 track CDs for $9.99 (don't think they do but not sure) I might be a bit more ok with it.

Listened to Star Time Box Set Discs 2 and 3. What a performer. Cold Sweat is still mind-blowing, but I can't even imagine listening to it when it first broke. It must have been like nothing else on the charts.

I finished The Emperor's Children. I have mixed feelings. It was a fairly fast-paced novel about priviledged young people in Manhattan, and two outsiders who try to break in. But I definitely feel that it is getting such high reviews (in NYTimes and the Economist) because the reviewers know so many of these people and actually are these people. And I know a few of these people and was a bit of an outsider the two years I was living in Brooklyn, only rarely going to the parties where the beautiful people hang out. Some of the portraits are fairly cutting about how spoiled these people are, but still it does little to shake their overall conviction that Manhattan is the center of the world (of course, one could say that 9/11 confirmed this in a macabre way). The treatment of 9/11 is a little odd. Messud doesn't dwell on the actual events -- sort of sidesteps it aside from a few pages -- then shows how it affected the characters in a very short time (up to a month after the event) and shows how little it really changed them. Though we do see newly-weds (who never should have married) who will probably soon split up in part due to the strain of events. Maybe it is better than a novel (like McInerney's recent one) that roots around in it (or spends half its time glorifying firefighters), but there are still a few strained coincidences. It did prompt me to remember my experiences, so I guess that's something. So anyway, not a complete success for me. Maybe my expectations were just too high. I'm about to start Jacobson's Kalooki Nights, which is apparently about a Jewish cartoonist who focuses on the Holocaust. I wonder what Art Spiegelman would have to say about this.

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in the forums, but this is pretty funny. Rob Paravonian shows how basically half of today's music uses the chords behind Pachelbel's Canon (or Pachabel's Canon). It's worth watching to the end. Pachabel on Youtube

It's no good you saying "I criticise". What's the problem? (And please remember you're talking to a tech idjit.) MG Most MP3s are sampled at a lower rate than CDs. So even after burning them to a CD they won't regain anything lost in compression. This hardly matters for pop music, which has been overcompressed for radio play, but it generally will make a difference for jazz and classical, though how much it actually matters to you depends on the quality of your sound system and your own ears. It doesn't bother me too much, and I have been a faithful subscriber to emusic for quite a while. I'd rather have mp3s than nothing (and I don't think trying to hold out for better formats is terribly realistic). But check out this story: Rough trade MP3s Rough trade is trying to take away one of the few advantages of the digital era and create an artificial scarcity. Limited edition download, my ass. I think this activity is shameful and will definitely not support them.

I suppose it is easier to download the archived shows, but BBC Radio 2 is picking up the Dylan show. Link here: Dylan on BBC 2 They say these are only available to UK listeners, but sometimes there are ways around these things. I'll probably listen to them "live" just for the experience.

Well, from my significant other and the rest of the family, I got nuthin. We are preparing to move in a few more months and decided not to do gifts. Now I did get her a couple of CDs, but I really didn't get anything from her. I did get a few things for myself, sent to a friend, which I will retrieve after the move: Horace Tapscott - Dial B for Barbara Reptet - Do This Andrew Hill - solo Select Tati - Playtime So a fairly low-key Christmas, even by my standards.

You're right Felser. What they're doing is putting stuff out for download that they used to have as CDs. As far as I know, nothing's gone for download that hasn't already been issued as a CD. The companies don't seem to be remastering material in order to make it available as downloads. The possible benefit to the (US) consumer might be price (though I suspect not, in most cases I've seen prices of $9.99). And, as far as Universal is concerned, no benefit to European consumers, since we can't get them through emusic. MG There were/are some Impulse downloads not available as CDs, though I suppose they might have been mastered for Japanese CDs. I suppose one benefit would be if the downloads are never allowed to go OOP, though currently the price is too high for the quality and lack of liner notes, etc. But it does seem like the beginnings of a fairly major and permanent shift, unfortunately to a worse medium. While I am satisfied with current DVD technology, at least one senses that Blue-Ray and whatever the other new medium is are better technologies. But replacing CDs with mp3s does pretty much suck.

The other question is what company would fill this niche if they weren't around. I suppose someone would eventually acquire the rights to Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini and a few others. But Powell & Pressburger, Tati, Naruse, etc., etc.? The demand for these films in the US is not so huge, and I think it is great they are around -- even if I don't buy that many from them.

I do generally prefer to rent rather than buy them (and the Chicago Public Library has been very good about stocking nearly every one of their in-print titles). But some of the multi-disc sets, particularly when there are great bonus features and long essays in the booklets, are definitely worth it. I'm thinking in particular of Brazil, Naked Lunch, Short Cuts, and the re-issued Playtime.

I don't know anything about this LP, but I have heard of Pat Thomas before. My father-in-law kept asking me to track down her version of Desafinado, which was a minor hit in the early 1960s. So I managed to find it on some compilation CD. It's a nice version. Too bad she never got much of a break.

They said probably late Jan. Too bad, as I was really hoping to pick the Hutcherson up on a quick trip to the States the third week of Jan. I guess I'll get it in March then.

Me too, even though I have almost all on LP. Anyone heard when it is actually shipping? I am probably going to drop them a quick note if no one else has any news.

Am reading Any Human Heart by William Boyd, which is a novel in journal/diary format. It is written as if it were the personal diaries of a British art dealer/critic who meets all kinds of interesting people in London, New York, Lisbon, etc. However, the character is fictional, though many of the people he supposedly interacts with (Picasso, Hemingway) are real. It's generally pretty good. Since the guy largely meets people in these circles, it isn't too much like Zelig where he meets everyone in the 20th C. I have on deck (and read just a few pages into) Messud's The Emperor's Children, which looks promising -- and is in the same kind of vein as the Boyd novel. This is about a core group of young, talented Manhattanites, generally working in the arts world and their interactions, pre- and post-9/11. FWIW, the Economist considers this one of the best novels of 2006.

PM sent on Raw Materials and Codebook.

I've digitized maybe a 5th of my collection, but ironically I leave the hard drive at home (where I don't have much time to listen to music) and only have random things on my work computer. So I bring in a few things here and there, but mostly listen to what is still on the work computer. This means the only CDs I listened to more than a few times in 2006 are Acoustic Ladyland - Last Chance Disco, Polar Bear - Dim Lit, Paul Motian - I Have the Room Above Her and Garden of Eden, Vijay Iyer - Reimagining, Coltrane - LiveTrane disc 7, Bruce Cockburn - Waiting for a Miracle, Soul Coughing - Best of, Lee Morgan - The Procrastinator, Stanley Turrentine - The Spoiler and the Spamalot soundtrack. Towards the end of the year I went on a bit of a Grant Green/Sonny Clark and Horace Silver kick where I listened to most of their CDs in sequence but only one time through for each.

They are funny, but if you probe enough you find that in fact they were written by adults for a bad-writing competition. I was slightly reassured to learn this, just like when you pass on buying a CD that you think you already own and you come home and find out that you do indeed own that particular CD.