ejp626

Don't know if any of it's any good or not. On the whole I am not too interested in the line-up so far, but I do think Vijay Iyer is going to be there, and I'll try to make that. Also not really jazz, but worth checking out, is Vieux Farka Toure. I may be able to make one of his shows. David Murray is going to be there, but he is featuring Macy Gray, and that just doesn't strike me as something I want to see. Actually, Herbie Hancock will be there as well, but the tickets are very high, and his latest concert outings have been pretty underwhelming, so I think I'll pass. So on the whole, I'll mostly be giving this a miss.

I guess this more for the CD-R thread, but apparently quite a few of these old series (Gildersleeve and the old mysteries, Philo Vance, Nick Carter, etc.) are badly burned DVD-Rs that Amazon is producing themselves. So buyer beware...

So strange, several of the Amazon reviews are clearly referencing Kirk's Work (aka Funk Underneath) with RRK and Jack McDuff rather than the self-titled T.J. Kirk album. Both sound worth a listen. Looks like eMusic has Talking Only Makes it Worse, so I'll probably check it out that way next month.

Good points about how much of the core repetitoire does one need. I have definitely cut back on sets that are basically just Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak and perhaps Mahler. I am a bit more willing to get sets where there are particularly strong soloists in the concertos (why I ultimately got the Steinberg EMI box) and I still go for sets with lesser-known conductors (so the Russian Conductors sets are generally good as was the Silvestri EMI box). Definitely on the fence regarding the Reiner and will need more details. As far as the Heifetz, I have a fair bit of him in other formats, though I did get the Heifetz-Piatigorsky Concerts box, which seemed like a good compromise. There is some excellent music there!

Well, I probably don't need this, as I have an awful lot of it in the Living Stereo Box, but I may get weak and go for it. It depends on just how low it goes, I guess.

Those albums have not aged well for me - and I liked them (and him) back in the day. Always have found "Enigmatic Ocean", with strong guitar by Allen Holdsworth and Darryl Stuermer, to be the best of the bunch, I find myself now going to his older stuff if I am going to listen to him. I think I'll pass on these. I am somewhat more interested in the similar Al Di Meola set, esp. from some of the secondary sellers: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Album-Classics-Al-Meola/dp/B003ZBX83M/ref=pd_sim_m_2 Not sure I will actually bite though as I have no extra shelf space at all!

I picked up Dusk and Other Stories recently. I haven't cracked it yet, and probably won't for some time, but I have certainly heard good things about it. (It was actually lost/stolen at my local library, and assuming I finish it in any reasonable time frame, I will donate it as a replacement (probably).)

I read and "enjoyed" the Idiot as a young adult, also Karamazof and Crime and Punishment (twice). I wonder now if I was making allowances to bolster how clever I thought I was being. I'm currently reading The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. Laugh-out-loud funny and very educational. I probably will reread Crime and Punishment in the next couple of years. I suspect that one will still grip me, but hard to say. All of Dostoevsky's novels are basically concerned with interior thoughts, so he spends scads of time telling you things that aren't apparent from the surface of conversations. (This is what I am reacting badly to.) I think, but can't entirely recall, that The Idiot is the most extreme in this regard. Speaking of Jacobson, I never "got" Kalooki Nights at all. I'm also fairly sure I wouldn't like The Finkler Question, but his very latest (Zoo Time) looks interesting enough that I might give it a go.

On the final stretch of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (last 100 or so pages). I'm really not feeling it for a lot of reasons, mostly that everybody just sits around and has all these misunderstandings but Prince Myshkin is such a super guy (based on little more than his good nature, since he isn't called upon to actually, you know, do much of anything) that he tries to set things right. I am just finding it very, very boring. What worries me slightly is that I really enjoyed Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment as a young adult, and it would pain me to find that I didn't care much for his (very talky) style as an older (apparently grumpy) adult. Also dipping into Pu-239 by Ken Kalfus. The title story is fairly brilliant. Not as interested in the other stories, and in fact I completely skipped over one after a few pages where I found the main character so terribly (and unbelievably) obnoxious that I didn't want to spend any more time in his company (even to see if he got his comeupance). I think I'll mostly end up skimming and discarding this one...

Did anyone actually get this? There are a lot of very unhappy customers in the UK who are complaining that Amazon wouldn't honour their purchase, saying it was mispriced. However, some folks did get the set shipped at that price.

Definitely will be something at Jazz Showcase in the South Loop. Probably some other events elsewhere -- Green Mill perhaps?

Very solid -- quite a few ensembles I would turn out for, but I just can't make it this year. Tatsu Aoki and Eigen drumming is pretty good -- saw them years ago.

The British Library is only going to try to gather UK content, but that includes lots of blogs and maybe Facebook pages and probably your emails (esp. if on Gmail!): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9973160/British-Library-to-begin-web-harvest.html I believe I read that Google does harvest the web periodically but they keep mum about it given all the copyright issues involved.

Lois has stated that none of it will be archived, so as of July 1 every last word there goes bye bye forever. Well, it's captured somewhere (apparently the British Library among other places that takes a snapshot of the entire web), but it might be really a drag to try to retrieve it. I guess folks over there will have to decide what they want to do.

I think merging the two boards would be well beyond this board's capacity. But some key posts from the most critical threads could be reposted here (if the members move over here) and seed threads here. That was really all I meant.

Maybe the best of it can be migrated over.

And yet most (all?) of the teams are losing money hand over fist. It's fair to say that if Stern and the NBA weren't willing to cross-subsidize these losses it would fold quickly. It is hard to say if the next Commissioner will be quite so willing to continue the same level of support. Yeah, and while I have no reason to doubt that most WNBA franchises are losing money, there's always a little red flag in my mind when sports franchises claim they're losing money. I'm pretty sure there are major league baseball teams that year after year say they're losing money. Yet somehow they continue. Go figure. However, the league as a whole makes money, esp. from television revenue (huge) which is shared. If every team was losing money, it would fold. And many owners are willing to keep money-losing teams, seeing them as very expensive toys (that also help with their taxes). Simply not sure there are as many (male) owners who would get the same kicks out of owning a WNBA team.

And yet most (all?) of the teams are losing money hand over fist. It's fair to say that if Stern and the NBA weren't willing to cross-subsidize these losses it would fold quickly. It is hard to say if the next Commissioner will be quite so willing to continue the same level of support.

I should make it to the Winogrand exhibit this weekend. I believe this is the last weekend the SF MoMA is open for quite a while -- 18 months? (They might have a satellite open somewhere.) I hope the crowds aren't too terrible. On the other hand, there might be some good discounts at the bookshop.

Saw a few classical pieces by a subgroup of the VSO. There was a short 2-violin sonata by Prokofiev, followed by Bartok's Contrasts. Finally, the main event was a reduction of Shostakovich's 15th Symphony to a String Trio (with the piano player occasionally doubling on celeste!) and 3 percussionists. While this makes more sense than the piano transcription of Rite of Spring I saw back in Jan., it isn't entirely successful. The ending of the 3rd and 4th movement are pretty cool when the percussionists really get going, but during the slow sections (most of the 2nd) and the first part of the 3rd, there isn't enough energy in the piece when done primarily by the trio on their own. I'll have to listen to a full version of the symphony tomorrow. Still an interesting experiment, and it was worth going to check it out.

If I am understanding this correctly, it is over 2 hours of music for $7. I'm kind of intrigued by a 20+ minute version of Chameleon. Still thinking it over, but I'll probably buy the download. Thanks for the link.

I had a pretty cool manual typewriter from the 1930s or 40s, but I finally abandoned it in one of my many moves.

I'm trying very hard to scale back my purchases, but this looks like something I will spring for, once I figure out exactly what is going on with Mosaic and the new shipping rates to Canada. (I actually have a few Mosaic sets I am saving up for, but I can't recall if it is better to get them in one go and sometimes separately. It's probably different with the new postal rates anyway.)

It really depends on how much you care about the material on cassette. I picked this up for $15-20 and it is fine for pop cassettes: http://www.amazon.com/AGPtek®-Portable-Cassette-Converter-Headphones/dp/B005NGJLYW/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1369159533&sr=8-4&keywords=cassette+mp3 (I wouldn't use it for anything really rare.) You just need a lot of patience, since you have to record to .wav in real time. Then you probably want to split the wav files and convert down to flac or even mp3 files. I also wouldn't use the recording software that comes with the player. Just use a standard sound board to wav software (I forgot the name of the software I use -- only at home naturally).

I guess I find it falls into the area of wouldn't it be nice if ... Since people are not going to stop having a drink or possibly two and then driving, particularly in the U.S. where it is much harder (than say Europe) to find alternate transportation, do we want to tie up police resources for low level impairment or only focus on more serious impairment? Some might argue that it is not a zero-sum game, and that when the culture shifts, this won't be an issue. First, I don't think the culture will shift in the U.S. where we have made sticking it to the man part of our DNA. Second, police resources are stretched incredibly thin. I do see it as a zero-sum game (I see almost everything as a zero-sum game). And even threatening to redeploy police to enforce a very low blood alcohol level will further degrade respect for the police -- i.e. don't you have anything better to do... Granted if the police stopped enforcing the war on drugs, then they might have time to enforce the war on 0.05 BAL. I just don't see the marginal cost of extra enforcement as worth it frankly.