ejp626

Click here to see the new US nickels. Nickel story I do not like the front. The reverse is ok. I’ve got one of the 2004 nickels where only the back is different and that’s ok. The worst is that they say the front of the nickel isn’t ever going back. This is a problem when people have to justify their existence at the Mint. I hate all the new dollar designs. The quarter competition was pretty hokey, though there have been a few nice designs (NY, MI, IL, NH, NJ, VA), though some have really been awful (MD, AK, IN is the worst so far). Yeah, the states got to pick their own designs, but still the whole program was designed to show that the Mint still mattered. And why all this tampering with coins and bills since 1995? I don’t think there were any changes at all since the Kennedy half dollar through about 1995 (well, 1976) and now every year they come up with another coin promotion. Eric

This thread brings back vivid memories of going to a real Chinese restaurant in SF's Chinatown. I am a strict vegetarian (not vegan) so I bowed out of almost everything. There were some truly amazing items on the menu: duck tongue soup, beef tongue, brains, various kinds of feet. Then came the mixtures. I can't remember them all because it was making me kind of ill, but there was some kind of pie with beef tongue, pork and fish.

This reminds me of the time in the 1970s when researchers "proved" that plants -- and yogurt cultures -- had feelings. That said, I remember a cool shop that had a lamp wired to a bush, so you touched the leaves to turn the light on and off. It would be quite a downer though, to come home and find that your speakers had died because you forgot to water them.

I know this sounds like a total hoax (opening locks with a pen), but the biking community has discovered this and put it up on the web really just a day or two ago (and thieves have known for a while, which helps explain the number of locks just left around poles, etc.). It will probably be making mainstream news in a few weeks. Disclaimer - I haven't tried this myself but the videos and testimonials are pretty convincing. I'm at the office, and we are looking for a Bic pen now. I will be heading over to a bike shop tomorrow to see what they think about this. Apparently, if you call Kryptonite customer service, they do take this seriously. Busted lock movie Busted lock newsthread

We keep going round and round this issue, i.e. whether public domain is legitimate and what are its consequences. I suspect that BN would still issue some items that go into pd in Europe, but perhaps only in the US. Most consumers are not going to go out of their way to get these technically illegal imports, though this may be changing with Amazon. To me, there is one major difference with the medication analogy and that is BN and other labels don't keep all their items in stock at any particular time. Once it goes OOP, there is no difference from the labels' and the artists' perspective from buying something used on Ebay or from burning it, though you might feel morally better about the first option. To me there is a major catch-22. BN and others don't have this incentive to keep items in print, but then if they don't keep it in circulation, then I can't reimburse them for their product. And I don't have much incentive to wait and see if they happen to bring it back. I'll go with the p.d. source. For instance, I am interested in acquiring the Gil Melle BN sessions. It doesn't appear BN is going to reissue it at all. Most times it goes for $40-50 on Ebay. But in two years, everything will be p.d. in Europe, so that will probably be the route I will go. I would prefer to get the legitimate items, but that just isn't viable in a lot of cases. As far as Proper remasterings, they sound ok to me, but when you buy 4 CDs for the price of one, it really isn't quite the same as buying a fancy hardbound book and the expectations need to be kept in perspective. Caveat emptor and all that.

I would cut the passengers some slack. Up until that point, all training about hijacking was about minimizing conflicts in the air, since the hijackers obviously were rational and planned on landing someplace. Probably the stewards actually told people to stay calm and not to actively resist. Well, the old assumptions proved to be tragically incorrect. My understanding is that the passengers on the 4th plane only started actively resisting once they heard the news about the other three planes and it become clear they were dealing with fanatics. I still feel sick about it, mostly because of the loss of life, but also because of the aftermath (the rise of the neocons and more loss of life). It really will be a turning point in US history.

Yeah, I was there too. I was working out of offices on 34th St. with a view of the WTC. We saw pretty much the entire thing from the second strike on. It was certainly gruesome, especially as we had clients in the building and my boss was going to visit them the next day. Then our building had a few bomb scares over the next week, as everything came unglued. Of course, I will never forgive those who committed the act, but I also hate those who have exploited 9-11 for their own gain. These so-called patriots are beneath contempt.

This was discussed earlier, but is still pretty obscure: Al McKibbon Black Orchid

I also ordered this from Daedalus. It was pretty good, but not super memorable. I can't give you the details, since it is packed away, and you will probably have your copy before I get mine unpacked. But maybe I will add some further impressions later.

Ok, a little obscure. I'm working my way through the Tal Farlow set, and I see a liner note that they decided against including an 8 second false start ("a flub") that was included on a Verve CD. But then I notice that Disc 4 and 6 have quite a number of breakdown takes (not alternates), which isn't the way Mosaic often presents music. Was this done because Verve is going to also produce some of these sets? How did they work this out and decide what to leave out? I'm picturing MC arm-wrestling OK (or whomever is doing the Verve reissues now) to get him to drop these precious 8 seconds. If only he had lost ... Maybe we should demand a limited edition CD of the 8 second breakdown take.

I am counting Introducing Johnny Griffin as Griffin's debut rather than J.G. on Argo, and Introducing Johnny Griffin does have Kelly on it. However, I thought Kelly's New Faces, New Sounds had Griffin on it. This does not appear to be the case, but I shall claim that AMG led me to this error. Upon consulting a better discography, it appears Griffin never appears on any of Kelly's dates as a leader, though of course many were trio sessions.

I also like Nocturne and Night and the City, especially if I am unwinding from a long day. I have not heard Land of the Sun, but perhaps I will seek it out now. I do not like Haden's work completely undiscriminately, BTW. I cannot stand American Dreams. I wasn't crazy about Under the Missouri Sky the first time I heard it, but it really grew on me.

I liked Altered Carbon. It is a mix of cyber-punk and Chandler/Hammett P.I. novels. He has a new book out, but I haven't read it. Alan Dean Foster achieves a similar effect in The Mocking Program (not quite as cyberpunk though), which is one of his better efforts of the last decade. I wouldn't be too surprised to see Foster start a new series based around the main detective. My favorite of these SF detective novel hybrids are a trilogy by George Alec Effinger - When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun and The Exile Kiss. Out of print but pretty easy to come by. Do we need to split the What are you reading now into SF and non-SF threads?

I find myself buying more and more music on-line, so sometimes I don't end up with what I thought I was getting. Usually this is very upsetting but sometimes it works out ok. For instance, I decided to try to scoop up all the Vogue "In Paris" CDs before they go any further OOP. One of the artists that is still available is Barney Wilen. Somehow when I did a search on Amazon, I got confused and ended up ordered Lee Wiley. A completely different thing, and yet I am enjoying her singing and might even order some more of her music. Of course, I still need to get the Wilen. Any similar stories?

I remember on the board, we were discussing Johnny Griffin and Wynton Kelly's debut recordings, which are impressive, but are both quartet recordings (both Griffin and Kelly are on each other's debuts). I just picked up Blue Mitchell's Blue 6 on Riverside, which I am nominating as the debut album with the most impressive line-up: Blue Mitchell, Wynton Kelly, Johnny Griffin, Wilbur Ware, Curtis Fuller and Philly Joe Jones. I'm about to spin it now. Any other nominees?

I didn't save it but the Chicago Tribune Magazine had a long piece on pedestrians getting hit by Metra trains. A fair number of these are suicides. where the person absolutely does not want a chance at backing out. There usually isn't that much damage to the train, but there is quite a psychic toll on the engineer who cannot possibly stop the train in time. So a somewhat selfish way to go. I am always sorry to hear about suicides and just a bit baffled. I find it particularly sad when it is a young person, who just doesn't have the perspective to realize that most bad things do pass. There is a lot about this world and even in my life I don't care for, but I wouldn't willingly cash it in. I'm certainly in no hurry to find out if there is anything afterwards (especially as I am 95% convinced there isn't anything). I suppose the exception would be if I was in terrible chronic pain with no relief in sight.

Some of the classics of SF do end up being just awful when read as an adult. The Space Merchants, mentioned above, is not good. Bester's The Stars My Destination manages to violate almost every SF principle, but is still on many people's top ten lists. I recently reread the first five books of Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber and still enjoyed that. I am a little apprehensive about rereading Roadmarks, since it was an early favorite. I think Heinlein really went off the rails at The Number of the Beast and never recovered. But as a kid, I eagerly read all the musings from the dirty old man he had become. I generally find the SF novels that hold up the best are the most anthropological -- Cherryh's Wave without a Shore and her Chanur novels, LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness. David Brin seems pretty good still, even if his book did inspire Costner's awful The Postman movie. Ian McDonald is a good but obscure SF writer. One very interesting speculative fiction writer (not quite SF) is James Morrow who has written an entire trilogy about what happens when God's dead body turns up in the Atlantic Ocean. Towing Jehovah (the first) is the best in the series.

Yes, but I have all 15 volumes of Rhino's New Wave Hits of the 80's plus the New Wave Xmas album. It's what I grew up on and is part of my musical genetic make-up. There's no point in denying it, so I might as well embrace it. Not a true box set, however.

I saw the same sets as John, getting there about 5 minutes into the Anderson & Friends set and staying to the end of the Monksieland Band. Someone near me did make the comment that the programming was pretty poor, in the sense that people who weren't driven off by Anderson would be bored by the Waller Tribute, and people who liked the Waller would be put off by the freer Monksieland Band. I didn't enjoy the Anderson as much as hoped. One of the saxophonists (Blueit I think) did the circular breathing bit (described elsewhere as a parlor trick) and indeed it was boring. To me, having the third saxophone just didn't add anything special, and a different horn would have been better. It was just not thrilling to me. While I did enjoy the Waller Tribute, someone on the board said that the problem with many tributes is that they try to sound like something frozen in amber, as if nothing more recent had been played. Butch Thompson kept all the pieces under 3 minutes, and I swear that if he could have pulled it off, he would have added a sampling machine to add crackle to their performance to make it sound like a 78 (like the beginning of Moran's recent CD). Still, they did a nice job on replicating the various pieces. I thought Monksieland Band was by far the best. They started with Epistrophy, and here the three horns were sort of playing on top of each other, making a bit of dissonance. This effect was less noticable in later tunes. They also did Monk's Dream (where the drummer let things off), Crepusule with Nellie (Byron's feature), I Mean You (Douglas's feature). Hunger got the best of me, so I wandered off to get ice cream and missed the title of the next tune. Yes, it probably would have been better with Lacy there, but still very fine music. And a much more fitting tribute, taking Monk's work but not being bound to it, the way that Butch Thompson was. I think this group will tour, so be on the lookout for them. I came very close to going to Hothouse to see Malachi Thompson's Africa Brass Band, but I still had a ton of unpacking to do, so I just went home. (I missed Sat. because of my move, which definitely bummed me out.) Eric

There are probably a dozen places you could play in Chicago, but I have 0 contacts at any. I think the very best fit would be the Green Mill, but they have their own B-3 group that plays once or twice a month. (This is the Deep Blue Organ Trio, who really seem to get around.) Schubas Tavern maybe Shubas I am attaching an edited list of jazz clubs from the Chicago Reader (dropped Empty Bottle, Hothouse, etc. which tend towards free jazz). Anyone else in the area can chime in as well. Good luck. Hope you make it out here. Eric ANDY'S 11 E. Hubbard: Bar and restaurant. Fridays, 5 PM, Eric Schneider/Greg Fishman Quintet; 9 PM, Erwin Helfer & the Chicago Boogie Ensemble. Sundays, 7 PM, and Saturdays, 6 PM, Martin Bany River North Quartet. Mondays and Tuesdays, noon, Tom Hope. Mondays, 5 PM, Chuck Hedges Swingtet; 9 PM, "No Am/Pro Jam" with Art Davis, Don Stille, John Bany, Charlie Braugham. Tuesdays, 5 PM, Bobby Lewis/Jim Ryan Quintet; 9 PM, Men of Note. Wednesdays, noon, Rich Moore & Aaron Krueger; 5 PM, John Brumbach Quintet; 9 PM, Henry Johnson Organ Express. Thursdays, noon, Bernard Alcorn; 5 PM, Russ Phillips & the Windy City All-Stars; 9 PM, Mike Smith Quintet. 312-642-6805. CALIFORNIA CLIPPER 1002 N. California: Sat 9/4, 10 PM, Kimberly Gordon, Deep Blue Organ Trio. 773-384-2547. FILTER 1865 N. Milwaukee: Tuesdays, 8 PM, David Boykin with Nicole Mitchell, Josh Abrams, Jim Baker, and Mike Reed. 773-227-4850. FIREPLACE INN 1448 N. Wells: Thursdays, 7 PM, J.J. & the Jazz Masters (no cover). 312-664-5264. FUNKY BUDDHA LOUNGE 728 W. Grand: DJs spin 9 PM-2 AM nightly (until 3 AM Saturdays). Sundays, Zzaje performs during an open mike for vocalists, spoken word, MCs, and poetry. 312-666-1695. GREEN DOLPHIN STREET 2200 N. Ashland: Sat 9/4, 9:30 PM, Detour. Tuesdays, 6:30 PM, Jose Valdes Trio (no cover); 9:30 PM, Edgar Marroquin, Luis Rivera & Carlos Latalladi spin mambo, salsa, cha-cha, bachata, and merengue. Wednesdays, 9 PM, Bill Porter Orchestra with Rich Fudoli. Thursdays, 6:30 PM, Vince Willis. Sat 9/11, 9:30 PM, Nicholas Barron's Hyperactive. 773-395-0066. GREEN MILL 4802 N. Broadway: Fridays, 5-8 PM, Ben Rudolph (no cover). Fri 9/3, 9 PM, Ryan Cohan Quartet. Fridays, 1:30-4 AM, Green Mill Quartet (no cover). Sat 9/4, 8 PM, Steve Evans Quartet. Saturdays, midnight-5 AM, Sabertooth Organ Quartet. Sun 9/5, 1 PM, Bloom School of Jazz (no cover); 11 PM, Kimberly Gordon Organ Quartet. Tuesdays, 9 PM, Deep Blue Organ Trio. Wed 9/8, 9 PM, John McLean Septet. Thursdays, 9 PM, Alan Gresik's Swing Shift Orchestra. Fri 9/10, 9 PM, Chevere. Sat 9/11, 8 PM, Frank Catalano Quartet. Sun 9/12, 11 PM, Kimberly Gordon Trio. 773-878-5552. HOUSTON'S 616 N. Rush: Restaurant with music after 5:30 PM. Fridays and Mondays, JoAnn Daugherty Trio. Tuesdays, Bob Dogan, Joe Adamik & Paul Martin. 312-649-1121. MARTYRS' 3855 N. Lincoln: Tue 9/7, 8:30 PM, Alfonso Ponticelli & Swing Gitan. 773-404-9494. 96TH FLOOR LOUNGE 96th floor, John Hancock Center, 875 N. Michigan: Music at 7:30 PM. Sun 9/5 and Mon 9/6, Bill Peterson & Brian Sandstrom. Tuesdays, Larry Luchowski. Wednesdays, Paulinho Garcia. Thursdays, Dennis Luxion. Sun 9/12, Professor John Duo. 312-787-9596. O'BRIEN'S 1528 N. Wells: Sundays and Wednesdays, 7 PM, Denise LaGrassa. 312-787-3131. PETE MILLER'S STEAKHOUSE 1557 Sherman, Evanston: Restaurant with music at 8:30 PM; no cover. Sat 9/4, Nicholas Barron's Hyperactive. Mondays, Lawrence Hobgood Trio. Tuesdays, Ron Perrillo Trio. Wednesdays, Bobby Broom Trio. Fri 9/10 and Sat 9/11, Deep Blue Organ Trio. 847-328-0399. POPS FOR CHAMPAGNE 2934 N. Sheffield: Music at 9 PM Fridays and Saturdays, 8:30 PM Sundays through Thursdays. Fri 9/3 and Sat 9/4, Frank Russell Trio. Sundays, Russell Alan Rowe Trio (no cover). Mondays, Alison Ruble Duo (no cover). Tuesdays, Typhanie Monique & Neal Alger (no cover). Wednesdays, Andy Distel Trio. Thursdays, Ryan Cohan Trio. Fri 9/10, Typhanie Monique Quartet. Sat 9/11, Corky McClerkin Quartet. 773-472-1000. ROSA'S LOUNGE 3420 W. Armitage: Fri 9/3, 9:30 PM, Dee Alexander (see Critic's Choice). Sat 9/4, 10 PM, Malachi Thompson's Freebop Band with Maggie Brown & Billy Branch. 773-342-0452. SIGNATURE ROOM 95th floor, John Hancock Center, 875 N. Michigan: Music at 6:30 PM. Fridays, and Sun 9/12, Bill Peterson & Rich Fudoli. Sat 9/4, Dennis Luxion & Brian Sandstrom. Sun 9/5, 11 AM-2 PM, Bill Peterson; 6:30 PM, Bill Peterson & Brian Sandstrom. Sat 9/11, Bill Peterson & Kelly Sill. 312-787-9596. UNDERGROUND WONDER BAR 10 E. Walton: Mondays, 1 AM, Mark Madsen. Tuesdays, 10:30 PM, Lorna Boston Band hosts the pro jam. Thursdays, 10:30 PM, Luiz Ewerling & A Cor do Brasil; 1:30 AM, Vince Willis. 312-266-7761.

This Bershire site does look pretty good. In addition to picking up the Urgreter, I found they had 65 ECM CDs for $6-7 each, so I got a few of those. They did have a note up that said they couldn't ship ECMs back to Europe for whatever reason.

How about the Pillar of Flame? I'm leaning toward F myself.

We used to make this drive all the time too, and you rolled up the windows and turned off all vents until you were through Gary. But it really has improved dramatically. I guess that's what deindustrialization will do for a city. Most of the residents wish the steel plants were still open.

This is close, but she needs three terms not four, so she would stop at 11/50, which will still be a very small fraction. Here she is calculating drawing four spades.

Parker was cloned in a top secret government operation aimed at demoralizing the Nazis, who loathed degenerate music. Unfortunately, by the time the clones were ready, the war had ended. The clones scattered to the four corners of the globe. Most became productive, if eccentic, members of society, including a cowboy, a Tibetian monk, a rugby player, a champion yodeller, and a taxi driver in Tokyo. One unfortunate clone committed suicide after an unsuccessful stint writing greetings for Hallmark Cards.