Kevin Bresnahan

My wife had several family members on her mother's side die from diabetes. The disease was not well understood back then, nor was treatment as widespread as it is today. My mother-in-law told me that her sister going blind was how they found out that she had diabetes and that she died before they could get it under control. I think that was only the late 50's.

If it gets real bad at night, I take a Mucinex DM and it helps a lot. This cough is annoying but at least I still have my sense of taste. I know several people who can't taste anything. I would have some trouble with that. I'd have a lot of wine down in my cellar that I'd have to get rid of.

Almost 4 weeks after getting Covid, I still have a nagging cough. It gets worse at night.

He was a great actor, even if he only had a bit part. He really brought President Snow to life in those "Hunger Games" movies. Whenever I see "Animal House", I feel a bit bummed out when his scenes are on. I hope he fired the agent that told him to take the cash up front instead of a piece of the pie that he was originally offered. He lost out on millions & millions of dollars because of that agent.

The last time I saw Billy with The Cookers, he was extremely happy when I asked if I could get a picture with him.

He was a bit before my time & he played when the only thing you saw on TV was your local team, which for me was the Red Sox. Willie spent his whole career in the National League so he never played the Red Sox. I never saw him play. But I had his baseball cards in the late 60s & early 70s when he played for the Mets. I vaguely remember seeing some of his plays on the news when I was a kid. But that catch - everyone saw The Catch, which was "The Catch" before the NFL's 49ers co-opted the term.

That bacon-shaped stuff looks like someone patterned taco chips to look like bacon.

I don't understand your point... I'm talking about donating books like Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich, where the library might have books 19, 20, 22, 24 & 26 on the shelf and you give them 21, 23 & 25. They end up in the book sale area. It's even more frustrating when someone comes in and has to request an inter-library loan for them. If they don't cater to their clientele's wants, what's the point in managing a library? You need to put books on the shelves that people want, not what the head librarian wants. What's even weirder is that there's a library one town over that stocks nearly all of these types of books and they accept my town's library card so me & my wife go down there more often than we go to our local library. How is that good library management? I miss my old library in Atkinson, NH. While they also didn't do anything with donations (especially music donations), they seemed to have the pulse of the library's patrons and stocked what they wanted. This one in my new hometown does no such thing. But back to the topic at hand - I would never donate any of my music to any of my local libraries. None of them would ever think of putting any of it on their shelves. In fact, I don't think any of my local libraries even loan music out & most of them are slowly removing their video titles. Most everyone streams music & movies these days, so it makes sense.

This has been my experience as well. It's rather frustrating when you talk to a head librarian to ask why they don't put certain donated books on their shelves, especially if they don't have a copy of a particular book on the shelf now. In two cases where I had this conversation, the answer was the same - the library only has so much shelf space and they had to be selective with what they put there. When I pointed out that some of the books I was donating filled holes in author's bibliographies, they stuck to their guns. Only they could decide what went on their shelves. Basically, the feeling I got was that libraries only buy what the head librarian wants. They really don't care what anyone else wants.

I have a large wine cellar myself and my age has me re-thinking many of my future purchases. I am no longer buying any wine that needs needs a long time in the cellar before it's ready to drink. It's a bit sad to have to pass on some great wines but I know that even if I'm here in 15-20 years, I don't think I'll be drinking much wine nor do I think I'll appreciate it as much as I do now. Like others have mentioned, I have to do something about my music collection. I'm about to start listing a bunch stuff but there's no way I could ever sell it all off. It would take decades. Plus, selling LPs is pain in the ass. Grading is everything and today's record buyers seem to want every LP to be perfect. No LP is perfect. You play it once and it's no longer perfect. On top of that, the shipping boxes for LPs are getting crazy expensive. The best LP mailer, Bags Unlimited's Might Music Mailer sells for almost $4 each & the box needed for shipping box sets are $4.50 each. I wish Stereo Jack's was still Jack's place. I would feel comfortable bringing my collection there. Now, I don't know where I'd bring them.

David Bowie - Heathen (Columbia). I'm listening to the 5.1 surround mix from the SACD. It's too bad that many of the later releases from older rock artists can't get any radio play today. This is a very good album that I bet hasn't been heard by many rock fans. One minor complaint - I wish the mastering wasn't so heavy with the .1 aspect of 5.1 surround. I had to turn my subwoofer way down to make this listenable. It was thumping away like I was watching a movie with a bunch of explosions.

Mary Glennon, one of my Facebook friends, posted that she went to see Renee Rosnes at the Village Vanguard last night and she said that the new management has re-done the audience seating area. Her comment was that the seating was "stacked in lines like chairs in a gym and there are no sight lines" & that the chairs are "stacked knee to knee to the chair next to you". She said it's worse than the Blue Note, which doesn't seem possible. Ugh. She also said that there was no table for your drink. Instead, you have to hold it in your hand the whole show (note - they have a two drink minimum). To add insult, they no longer have a waitstaff, so good luck getting that 2nd drink that you prepaid for up front. One of the things I loved about the Vanguard was the sight lines. It seemed like no matter where you sat, you could catch a glimpse of one of the band members up on stage. I had a friend who loved to sit along the side wall on one of the padded benches. He claimed that was where you got the best sound too.

He was quite the drummer on those Dexter Gordon recordings.

Steve Turre's Generations band has his son Orion on drums & Wallace Roney Jr on trumpet. Steve Turre and Wallace Roney played together quite a bit.

My wife & I are over Covid now but we have the nagging cough that just won't go away. We've been told that it may take several weeks to get over this cough.

Probably true, particularly in the case of my grandfather. I never even knew he fought in WWI until his dementia took over and it started spilling out non-stop. Up until then, he was just my grampa. When I was a kid, me & my friends used to play a game we called "Army", where we all ran through the woods with plastic guns yelling " Bang" and "killing" each other. Back then, it was a bunch of boys having fun. I even had a fake BAR and whoever had that gun would go by "Kirby", named after the character in the TV show "Combat!". I cannot imagine that would ever happen today.

The few men I knew over the years who had seen live action, never really wanted to talk about it. One was my late father-in-law, who saw action in Korea. I remember asking him what it was like and he really didn't want to talk about it. I asked him if it was because he had to kill people and his response was, "I assume that I killed the people who stopped shooting at me after I shot back". Another was a guy I worked with when I was a teenager. He had been in the jungles of Vietnam & he was really messed up by it. He had all kinds of physical ticks, especially when there were loud noises. He stuttered when he swore, which made us all laugh but he said it started when his tent-mate blew himself up with a grenade right next to him. We never laughed at him again. I guess that might make me stutter too. The worst case of PTSD I knew personally was my grandfather. By the time he died at the age of 97, his waking moments all took place in a WWI foxhole, with his friends getting killed around him all the time. It was so sad to watch. That was one of the few deaths where "his suffering is finally over" really fit the situation.

The Police - Synchronicity "Mother" is still a terrible song but "Every Breath You Take" is a masterpiece.

I have ripped my whole CD library into Q0 VBR mp3 files which I have stored on multiple external hard drives for redundancy. No one is going to take this library away from me unless they somehow manage to erase all of these drives. I used to store one at work but now that I'm retired, I have to store one at my daughter's house. One of the cool things about doing this is that I attached one to a Rasspberry Pi mini-computer running Volumio so I can play anything in my library on my main music system using my laptop or cell phone. I don't use the cell much as it's slow as heck accessing such a huge library. If an Apple computer allows an external drive for your music library, I would do the same thing there. I would never allow Microsoft or Apple to store my library, especially if they restricted my access. Your son should find out how to download his music back onto his PC and then back it up to an external hard drive.

I played the baritone horn in my high school band and when I first got into Jazz, I was surprised to find that there were bari horn players on a few dates. I was talking about it on-line somewhere and I got into a little e-mail exchange with Zawadi about it. I wish I had those e-mails but they are long gone. Looking back, there are so many e-mail exchanges I wished I kept, but I always treated e-mails as a temporary things & deleted them after reading them to save drive space.

For some reason, I have never gottne into Dire Straits' live recordings. I used to own "Alchemy" but I think I spun it once or twice. I'd much rather hear one of their studio albums. I don't think I even own "Alchemy" anymore. I'd be interested in hearing this but it appears to only be available in an expensive box set.

I'm feeling pretty good now. My wife still has a nasty cough.Strangely enough, the Maine CDC still calls people who get diagnosed at a medical clinic and meet certain risk factors (I'm old! ) so I got all of the recommendations read to me over the phone. According to them, I can go out without a mask 10 days after my first positive test, which is tomorrow. Seems pretty quick but you hope they know what they're doing after all this time with Covid in our world. The first time me & my wife got Covid, she got Paxlovid. It did seem to help but she had to stop taking it because it was making her miserable with the constant taste of metal.

I seem to be over it after day 6, but this morning my wife tested positive and she's feeling pretty lousy already. Her only saving grace so far is that her symptoms don't include a throat that feels like it was slashed with razor blades. Apparently we didn't quarantine quickly enough.

I really wish I had done this. I've seen so many jazz greats over the years that I've forgotten more than I remember.