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I actually go to this museum every couple of months. It wasn't me though. It's a damn shame, but really what a stupid place to put priceless vases. The Guardian has a pretty good blog on whether you the reader has broken anything priceless. It gets kind of stupid 3/4 of the way through, but until then some priceless and sad stories of average folks with the fumblies. Guardian Blog I have broken a few things through the years, but the only valuable things were my own and not someone else's which makes it a little better.

My next one will be Alice In Jazzland, his big band recording from the late Sixties, originally remastered for Blue Note International but left in a vault until now. Can you say more about this? It sounds promising indeed.

Alexander: I feel for you, but my experiences in two years of inner city teaching can easily top that. I came in with no experience and was put into classes immediately, instead of having a mentor. Not so good, but I had gotten used to it. Then a few weeks into the year, they pulled me out of my classes, gave them to a sub, so I could watch my "mentor," who was among the most useless teachers in the whole school and was only doing this to get the extra bonus money. So that totally undercut my authority with the kids. After a few more weeks of this, I got my students back, then got into a row with the teacher I shared a room with. She put up problems on the board for the entire day and refused to let me erase the blackboard! After complaining about this, I was transferred to the Special Needs classes. Not one, not two, but five periods of teaching remedial math to 9th grade students who had failed math and english in middle school, and were also felt to be discipline problems. It really was little more than baby sitting. I handed out suspensions frequently but was always seen as a weak teacher they could get over on. Many of the students were waiting to turn 16 to drop out, and I think I lost about five or six to that and two girls got pregnant and left. The second year was marginally better, and I think I reached two of my five classes. One class was horrible with a completely out of control student that I couldn't do anything about (he was related to the school security guard). Oh did I mention the school was considerably mobbed up, with the teachers with the best assignments having ties with the Mob? And a fire drill pulled by the students at least twice, often three or four times a week? And one of my drop-out students from the previous year killed in a shooting, which then started a chain of gang related violence inside the school? And a handful of the very worst teachers either encouraging cheating on the standardized exams or actually selling drugs in the school? Unlike most of my students, I had other options, and I soon exercised them. I did stop by a few years later to see how many of my students graduated, and more did than I would have expected. Now whether that H.S. diploma really means anything is another story.

My experience is that as eBay has "matured," the number of con artists and sleazy operators has increased considerably. I've had a few experiences with the eBay stores where the sellers offer a good price but then it turns out they are selling something not in stock (to be special ordered), and it takes months. I'm about to cancel one of these transactions, which has dragged on forever. (I suppose this is not that different from gemm, where probably 2/3 of the stores listing material I search on is not actually in stock.) I just find the overall eBay experience a lot worse than it was a few years ago, so I pretty much stick with Amazon sellers and zStores.

It's gotten to the point I virtually never check eBay anymore. In part, I've filled in most of the major gaps in my collection, but overall it's gotten to be such a hassle (and rising amounts of fraud) that I don't want to bother. It's just not fun anymore. I currently can't use half.com (can't pay with non-US credit card or Paypal for some ridiculous reason) so only use Amazon or gemm.

Well, I'm still not crazy about the Bad Plus, but I think it is very cool that they have a pretty deep understanding of where jazz came from and where it went it the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that they would tip their fans off to Nessa Records is also cool, though it means anyone on the fence for the AEC box had better move.

Eric Kloss - several Prestige 2-fers are available on eMusic. I've never heard of this cat, but Scott Yanow (I know) gives him props and says he could hold his own when he was a youngster. Anyway, I just found out that one of Booker Ervin's last recordings was on Kloss's In the Land of Giants, which is available on eMusic. Anyone have any thoughts on this or the other Kloss albums? I'll probably download it next week.

My order showed up this week (I was away, so it greeted me upon my return!). Anyway, it was the full size Wes Montgomery and Bill Evans Riverside boxes -- booklet and all. Really such a steal at those prices.

J.J Johnson Small Groups

Recent story listed on Sports Illustrated The last sentence sounds a lot like the set-up to either a farce or a tragedy. For a movie with more than a bit of both, Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue Part 10 deals with two brothers who have to decide how to split up their father's priceless stamp collection. At least once in your life, you need to see the entire series.

I see they have added two albums by Fieldwork (or maybe Field Work), which is a trio Vijay Iyer is a member of. I don't know too much about this group, but I like Iyer a lot, so will download both albums when my downloads refresh.

I disagree that the situation is really that different. From an economic (not moral) point of view, you need to consider past sales as sunk costs or sunk benefits. The fact that it was a legitimate purchase is irrelevant to the fact that there won't be any future revenue from a person who buys a used CD.

In the U.S. libraries are covered in the copyright law. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/usc...08----000-.html There's a short list of exemptions, like reproduction for the blind, exemptions for classroom teachers, fair use, etc. On the question of whether authors are harmed by library lending, they are harmed more when libraries deem their works unworthy of being collected and preserved for public use. My broader point is had RIAA and others been around, libraries would never have gotten established in the first place and thus won a place (or exemption) in copyright law.

Honestly if the RIAA, etc. were around in the 1800s and as influential as they are today, there would be no libraries and the very concept would be derided as communistic. It's only the fact that they have such a long history that keeps them safe.

I only did it one time, but I did complete a super Su Doku that was 4 x 4 squares building up to a 16 x 16 puzzle. It can be done, but it took a lot of time and didn't feel all that satisfying (I was bored with it long before I actually finished). I find one a week is just enough.

I was talking about moving iTunes special format over to MP3. Anyway, emusic downloads are regular MP3s. They generally are saved into a folder on your desktop. Once you find them, you can move them anywhere else you like and play them in regular players like WinAmp and do whatever you want with the playlists.

There are two general approaches -- which I blend a bit. You start in some square that has a few numbers filled in. You can either pick the first missing number (2) and say, hmm, which of the empty squares can hold 2. Or you can go through all the empty squares and fill in all the possible available numbers. I usually start with the first approach and move towards the second as I fill in things. This helps keep the puzzle slightly less cluttered. I write the possible numbers really small in the corners, then cross them off as they become unavailable. But I usually don't write down numbers if there are more than three possibilities for a square. I either move to a different 3 x 3 or work on a different number within that 3 x 3. The important thing is to start recognizing patterns and to look across the entire puzzle. Maybe it helps to think as in chess. A number blocks that same number from appearing in that same row and column, like a rook (sort of). The other thing is that as bits of the puzzle get filled in, you can use incomplete information to fill in elsewhere. So for instance, lets say the grid is like this: A B C D E F G H I If you can narrow a number down to A or D (because there is something that blocks all the way across G-H-I and there are some other numbers that get in the way), this may be enough to tell you where the same number is placed in the square above or below. Anyway, it's basically a winnowing process.

When I first moved over, I did them every day. Now I just do one a week (Saturday). There really is no math involved, but you do need to be good at working with patterns.

Hey, that's really good news!!! I hope you manage to get all the shows off. I had the mechanical failure, you speak of once. Who knows, maybe the tiny motor blew out. It would have been a near impossible job to transfer the physical components to some other drive just to get it to the point where I could run data recovery software. In the end, it wasn't worth it.

Well, the DRM issues suck, as one might expect. One can't use these downloads with Macs or Linux or iPod without some serious hassles. That said, there are still a few BN albums with only a few tracks where you can buy them for much less than on iTunes (where you must buy the entire album). So in a handful of cases it is probably worth buying the Walmart tracks, converting them to mp3 through some software (which I do own) and then using them as you please.

Emusic is greart, but it doesn't have any Blue Note or Verve, and while Walmart has a bunch of restrictions just like iTunes, it does have stuff from these labels. In fact, it looks like they may not have as many restrictions on the BN stuff as iTunes. I'll definitely check out the format of these downloads, and then I might well download Where is Brooklyn or something equivalent.

I have mixed feelings about Barber and wasn't impressed when I saw her live, but she is always striving for something new, and I appreciate that. This sounds like the kind of project I would be interested in.

Thanks to everyone's help, it does appear that I have the Wes Montgomery and Bill Evans Riverside sets winging their way to me across the Channel.

My disc 2 is ok as well. There is something unusual going on on track 4, but I decided it was percussion, maybe brush work.

It needs a sticker saying this book was proof-read by Adam Holzman.