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Very intrigued. Just ordered.

I haven't listened to all of it (just 2 or 4 CDs), but I enjoyed what I heard. Enigma Variations was nicely played. There is also the Cello Concerto (with Janos Starker); hard to go wrong there.

Keep putting Proust on the back burner. May just never finish, when it comes right down to it. Renata Adler's Speedboat -- pretty disappointed with this actually; intentionally disorganized snippets of text/anecdotes that she admits cut off before they actually gel or cohere. I think I'll be a lot more satisfied with Gregor von Rezzori. I have an early novel (Oedipus at Stalingrad) and a late novel (The Orient Express) checked out from the library. At one point, I owned a copy of The Death of My Brother Abel, but am not sure I still do. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Is it better than the real thing? Or is it the real thing? Recorded music is pornography. I'm slowly coming around to Gould's view that the conditions in the concert/opera hall are so crap that it just isn't worth it. I don't remember the situation in the UK, but the height of the concert season here just happens to coincide with crappy weather and a lot of people with hacking coughs that can't be bothered to bring any cough drops. Add to that, the general creeping selfishness of people who actually refuse to refrain from texting and what have you (to say nothing of those who forget to turn off their cell phones!) and you wonder why you spent this money. Just last night, in the middle of the sublime (yet so quiet) 2nd movement of Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto (performed by Yefim Bronfman) and someone's cell phone goes off -- and keeps going off for close to a minute before they silenced it. Puts a real damper on things, and basically I see people getting worse, not better... So I am generally opting not to go out and to listen to my "pornography" instead.

Anytime I've tried natural peanut butter, I find it disgusting and even get a bit ill. So yes, I'll take fake peanut butter anyday over the natural stuff.

Of course, if you are buying natural peanut butter, that's the mistake right there.

I have been spinning a lot of vinyl but not actually listening to it. I'm in the process of converting over a bunch of LPs that I've picked up over the last year. Some of it is great stuff, but then there is a whole stack of Bud Shank doing pop tunes that I imagine I'll listen to once and that's it. (I got these as part of a lot sale.) Just looking at the titles gives me the heebie-jeebies. I can see maybe doing one or two LPs of this stuff, but he's got at least 5: California Dreamin', Let It Be, Magical Mystery, Michelle, A Spoonful of Jazz... The last deserves special mention. From the back cover: Honestly, my opinion of Shank has dropped based on these records (and I have no respect for the writer of these notes (Patricia Willard) who even mixes up personal and personnel). Three of these tracks are Bud with strings (oh joy). Actually it is quite frustrating as he has some amazing personnel on some of the tracks (Frank Rosolino and Conte Candoli -- with Shorty Rogers arranging the whole album) but the starting material is just so weak. Anyway, I can't wait for the record store owner to laugh in my face when I try to pass these on to him.

RIP. I probably have more albums by him than any other UK jazz musician with possible exception of Tubby Hayes.

I just got my copy of Velvet Blue (the CD of the sessions from Kickstarter). Looks promising, and I can report back a bit later. (I'm very impressed they've already uploaded the track info to somewhere in the cloud, so that my player can figure out the track titles.)

I read this a few months back. Some parts are really interesting, and some just drag...

Yikes. I would be thoroughly pissed if I downloaded this music based on that cover. In the good old days, they would definitely be sued over this. Now it really isn't worth the trouble.

Sorry if already mentioned, but I picked up Slatkin conducts Elgar - a 4CD box (http://www.amazon.com/Leonard-Slatkin-Conducts-Elgar/dp/B00EC0VWQK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385954657&sr=8-1&keywords=slatkin+elgar) The store had it at a decent price ($18) and I had some store credit anyway... I'll try to report back after listening to some of it over the next few days.

In general, I have been underwhelmed by Anne Applebaum's various oped pieces in the Washington Post and/or Slate. They usually strike me as neo-con-lite (and consistently Rah-rah'ing for American Power) to the point I rarely click through if I see her name in the byline. However, I had no idea that she lives permanently in Poland and is married to Poland's Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski. That is certainly interesting.

So Terry Jones has revealed that the reunion shows will just be a rehashing of the old Python skits. (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/22/monty-python-reunion-o2-show-terry-jones) Pretty disappointing really. But hardly unexpected.

That's very strange. I put a few box sets in the cart and normally it came out to $15 to Canada (or the UK). 2 single CDs was usually $6 to Canada, which is 50% less than international shipping rates from Amazon (or really 75% less if each is charged a separate shipping rate, which is pretty typical nowadays). It's still far from ideal, but they seem to be trying to wrestle shipping charges down. I don't know the scoop about JazzLoft, but it's hard for me to imagine these options weren't also available to him.

Yes, but JazzLoft should have been positioned to benefit from the same shipping breaks that DG can exploit. It must have been incorporated as a business, etc. I'm just saying that if there were some options out there that would have lessened the pain for 40% of your customers, it would have been worth exploring them... In the larger scheme of things, it is completely ridiculous what happened to overseas shipping rates in the U.S. But at this point, the USPS is just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic (Harry Potter stamps, looking for corporate sponsorship of stamps, etc.). In 5-10 years, the international shipping rates for individuals will be so high, that it will grind to a halt. All the benefits of globalization will revert back to corporations and the little guy will be completely shut out. We will remember the glory years when you could send letters to international pen pals and send CDs/DVDs to them in the mail. That is definitely going away. And so it will all just be in the clouds...

I knocked off 2 from my list (The Bad Girl and Le Grand Meaulnes). While I will always prefer a printed book for reading on the go, reading the epub file (through an epub-reader extension on Firefox) wasn't too bad. I went ahead and downloaded a few more epub files from Project Gutenberg. Apparently, a bunch of folks on-line are reading Middlemarch in Dec. and have a whole schedule to follow. I might join along. I should be able to finish That Awful Mess on Via Merulana by Friday, then refocus on Proust. Or at least I should have been able to, except I have gotten interested in reading Robert Walser (Berlin Stories, The Tanners, etc.).

Looking at Sqidco's website I see they recommend using a company called Bongo International for shipping to overseas customers. According to them it could reduce the cost of shipping by over 80%!...too good to be true? Has anyone ever used this company? Edited to make it clearer what I meant! BTW here's a link that explains it in more detail: http://www.squidco.com/miva/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=S&Category_Code=POLICY I have no idea whether they use Bongo specifically, but I did note that Dusty Groove had found some way to cut shipping rates to Canada (didn't check to other countries). I mentioned this in an email to Alan, that it might be something he would want to look into. His reply indicated that he wasn't that interested -- he would stick with the shipping process he knew. So I can't help but feel that this is at least a bit self-inflicted.

It's a great set, one of the reference recordings of the Beethoven string quartets. It's been OOP for ages; this one could be either a reissue or one of those CD-R reprints. I'd check with the seller before buying. I guess this is a new naive reissue box set, part of their low-price series. It's available at European amazons pretty cheap as well: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beethoven-Complete-String-Quartets-set/dp/B0000DET84/ Apparently this set was selling for big prices on the 2nd hand market until this reissue, which appears to be standard CD. Interestingly, Amazon US does not appear to carry it, so maybe Arkiv has a scoop. In terms of dollars to discs, it is not an amazing bargain, but compared to reseller prices, it looks pretty good. Right now I have the complete Beethoven String Quartets only in 3 LP box sets issued years ago by Quartetto Italiano, which I think has been well-regarded. On CD I have the Middle Quartets (only) by The Fine Arts Quartet on Everest, and some of the Quartets performed by the Budapest String Quartet on Columbia, reissues of 1940s mono recordings. I could probably use one or two reference sets. I'd probably go with Tokyo String Quartet, esp. from an Amazon third party: http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Complete-Quartets-Tokyo-Quartet/dp/B008BOWG7C

I'm actually in the middle of a lot of novels, which isn't something I generally like to be doing, so I will try to close out on a few. The main problem is that the Proust volumes are quite heavy in addition to being slow going, so I can't take them everywhere, esp. if I know I need to be carting other things back and forth to work. I will have close to 8 hours on the bus tomorrow (Sat.) and maybe will get through a couple of shorter books instead. Anyway, Proust's Within a Budding Grove. An e-book version of Henri Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl (I am not at all taken with this one. I find it repetitive and quite tedious actually.) That Awful Mess on Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda (Maybe the best of the bunch, but I am having some trouble understanding why what comes across as largely a police procedural was considered (at one point) a major modernist masterpiece. Unless I am totally off-track, the revealing of how many unlikely people are implicated in the crimes was old hat when Priestly did it in An Inspector Calls.)

Yes, but... I'm reasonably sure that this kind of a project would get yanked for violating Kickstarter rules, i.e. there is almost no way you can deliver a product without having the rights. Of course that presumes that anyone cares enough to pay attention and report it to Kickstarter staff. And if you are honest about the fact that even if funded, there is less than 10% chance of seeing a physical product, who is going to chip in? So lame as it may be, I think the petition or Facebook campaign is the way to go.

Did this one get added: Also virtually every album with Honegger's Pacific 231. I have this one: But not these: These are all messed up. I think I finally have them fixed. Sorry for the delay.

I often go years between any alcohol consumption at all. I'm sure it has averaged out to less than 0.5 glass of wine/year. And I never drank beer even in my college days.

Probably a poor idea, but one never knows.

Saskatchewan - 40