Neal Pomea

Our public radio station moved all its music to HD (hybrid digital) and they gave away cheap HD radios to its members or to anyone making a $100 donation. I got one. Can't catch too many other stations, but at least the oldies station it can catch plays music from the 50s. Don't have HD radio in my car. I don't see how satellite radio is going to catch on. There will no competition, only homogenized offerings from a few mega-stations. Not very promising for small niche music markets.

Lidia's cookbooks are well done and easy to follow. A lot of cookbooks leave out the explanation, like you already know the chemistry behind what is happening while cooking. I find that I enjoy the cooking shows on PBS and Bourdain's No Reservations on the Travel Channel much more than the Food Network anymore. I will miss the Emeril Live show. Yeah, he could be a bit much but his food was good.

Astonishing! I guess musicians can't be too happy about radio disappearing, i.e. going more or less to "all talk" format! Was that ever lucrative for musicians or just for composers/publishers?

Not necessarily so. It could be, but it could work in other ways too. The song doesn't have to be in another musician's profile. It can be on the Web somewhere. People use those embedded music players to link to songs from my Web site, for instance (not my MySpace profile). They use up my bandwidth rather than putting the songs on their own server. The songs play as background music whenever their friends go to their MySpace page, but the bandwidth comes from me. If it ends up costing me too much bandwidth I will try to contact them and ask them not to link that way to my Web site for their background music, but I don't want to have to remove the songs from my Web site.

I wondered if the writer ever actually heard him. He was known for his smooth voice. I have never heard it characterized as gravelly. I was lucky to see him perform at an American Legion hall in Bethesda Maryland back when the hall was home to the Twist and Shout, a roots music club in the 80s-90s. He had a pick up band that including Buddy Charleton on steel (from Ernest Tubb's Texas Troubadours) and Eddie Stubbs on fiddle before Stubbs left the Johnson Mt. Boys and went to Nashville to become the announcer for the Opry. I never saw so many fans line up at break time for Hank's autograph! Before that I heard him at a farm implement show in Lafayette Louisiana in the early 70s when I was a teenager. One year it was Hank Thompson, the next year Don Gibson! Surprising music among the John Deeres, Minneapolis-Molines, Olivers, and Massey-Fergusons!

One of the greats! RIP. I've got a Humpty Dumpty Heart

In 2005 Houston was a wild card team, and they lost to the White Sox in only 4, but that was one of the most competitive World Series in recent memory. The run differential was only 6. One of the games lasted 14 innings. Every game could have gone either way. It was close to a Houston sweep, really. Unfortunately, not so good this year. I started losing interest when they were wasting warm weather days in early October for the sake of TV ratings, delaying the action until the weekend. Unless there is a team for me to root for, that kind of manipulation is leaving a very bad taste in my mouth. And you all know what it takes for me to admit bad taste!!

Not only that. By that time archaeologists will have unearthed an additional line from the Sermon on the Mount: "I'd rather go to hell in a wagon than heaven in an automobile!"

My optimistic side says "Are you kidding? It will be cool to venerate Jabbo Smith et al. in ways unheard of in the year 2007!!"

I remember the Joe Klein biography of Woody Guthrie discussing speculation that the onset of Huntington's Disease may have given rise to Guthrie being rather prolix. In some public performances of Reuben James, he would sing "Tell me what were their names? Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?" Then he would sing from memory over 140 names of the crewmen. But I don't see anything on Medline on the subject of Huntington's Disease that mentions this strange quirk with the language.

The article misses some apparent nuances about creativity. For quite a while in the U.S. the Congress and Supreme Court have agreed that holding a copyright monopoly until no one remembers or cares anymore about a work is the greatest contributor to creativity. "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts..." Hold on to that Happy Birthday song!!!!

Inning one, Boston up 3-0! What luck! My prediction for Rockies in 4 games, maybe 5, still holds.

There's no more reassuring voice in retirement planning than --- DENNIS HOPPER!

Indian's Wild Pitch Saws Bobbing Up and Down Kevin Youkliss in Half! Which network is covering the World Series? Hope it's not Fox.

Just think! In the future we won't be sending radio waves of our music into outer space anymore! With the current state of American radio, that's probably a good thing. On some far off, distant planet they'll probably be thanking us for not sending out those blasted songs!

Just to update, we received our cheapy HD radio (free for a hundred pledge to the radio station) and we're lucky it isn't any more cheapy than it is. The signal is pretty good, only occasional fading out. Not sure we will invest in a better sounding $300 model until we know the technology isn't going the way of the 8-track tape player. An advantage is that it is not subscription. Pays for itself in no time at all.

Things can certainly be thrown off that bridge without it being linked to Emmet Till. The lyrics of the song say a girl who looked like the singer and Billie Joe drop something off the Talahatchie bridge. It was two grown men who murdered Till. They confessed in Look magazine just weeks after their acquittal. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature...confession.html

Tonight's episode begins the story of Eugene Sledge, a Marine private from Mobile, Alabama. In the live chat with Ken Burns that I took part in through the Washington Post last Monday, Ken Burns said he was greatly inspired by Sledge's memoir, With the Old Breed. The images and footage are very moving, and some of the stories, like Babe and his Waterbury Connecticut family, and Walter Ehlers from Manhattan Kansas, or the story of Senator Daniel Inouye from Hawaii, well, it's great that these are preserved!

I couldn't find a topic on this. Sorry if I am redundant. WAMU in Washington DC has switched to HD radio, so that analog listeners can hear a news/talk station on their old fashioned radios, and music listeners need to buy an HD radio in order to hear 88. 5-2 for its musical offerings. I ordered one from the station for the price of a pledge (public radio station) but haven't received it yet. What I have read suggests that the technology is already obsolete and burdensome and will never catch on. What's your experience been? I hope it works out because 88.5-2 will be 24/7 of music as opposed to the analog station playing the music I like only on weekends!

I've watched two episodes and the background music has not had even a hint of country music, not even when covering Mobile Alabama. I thought one of the Japanese battle cries was "To hell with Roy Acuff!" I took part in yesterday's Washington Post live chat with Ken Burns (but somebody else asked the same question about how he chose the four towns.) You may have to register to see it, I don't know: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7090702377.html

His pantomimes are fully protected by copyright and will be for another 70 years. So don't try to mime your way out of a box. Maybe your great grandchildren will be allowed to do that.

Exactly!

I think The World at War will continue to be a more authoritative source than this documentary (magnificent!), but I look forward to this and reaction to it. I saw an hour of it in a presentation to a room of about 500 people and it was very moving. There'll be more footage of corpses washing up on the beach in the Pacific, from what I saw. The World at War was a bit distant about that sort of thing. Can't say how this documentary covers Africa and Europe. Musical choices? WTF? Burns spoke and gushed about Norah Jones' performance of a song that "summed it all up" at the end of the series. Well, it didn't represent ME too well, but I guess it represented somebody's taste.

Hamiet and Bluiett (Ham and Blue)

It's not like 1/5 is more than 1%, so no worries!