Neal Pomea

Yankees? "They're yesterday's news, kid." -- Gus Sands in The Natural

We mustn't mock NY, Boston, Chicago, LA, or any of those cities that proclaim themselves the center of the world, the only teams worth watching in the World Series. Bad baseball fans. Just kidding. Or am I? (That didn't look like Buck O'Neil, did it?)

He was a bigger than life person. Gracious. One of a few. Besides Ken Burns' Baseball, wasn't he also in Jazz? I swear I remember him talking about Swing music, which struck me. Does this ring a bell with anyone?

Congratulations to Oakland! And thank you Twins for a great season! My original prediction of A's/Padres in the WS may not come to pass. The Mets and Cardinals look stronger than I anticipated. In other news, Nationals are interested in Braves coach Terry Pendleton for manager. I would like that. Him or Joe Girardi.

Oakland takes Game 2, 4-2.

Ephesian boppers from Philadelphia? Move to Reissues, please.

Athletics v Padres For an all west coast series, would they start their games at 5 or 6 for the east coast audience?

He can record a win (game needs to go only 5 innings), but not a no-hitter. No hitter defined as follows: "An official no-hit game occurs when a pitcher (or pitchers) allows no hits during the entire course of a game, which consists of at least nine innings. In a no-hit game, a batter may reach base via a walk, an error, a hit by pitch, a passed ball or wild pitch on strike three, or catcher's interference." http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/official...regulations.jsp

After the first round, in which there are 4 teams in each league, there are two teams left to play a 7 game series for the league championship. They play 2 games at one team's home, 3 at the other team's home, then the remaining 2 games at the first team's home. The 4-3 advantage goes to the team with the best record that season. In the World Series, the 4-3 advantage goes to the league whose team won the All-Star game.

What's not to like? I like heavy handed, even more so with Monk and Mal Waldron, as well as a light touch.

I like the ragged but right Basement Tapes, especially the unofficial ones mentioned in my earlier post. Kicking My Dog is just hilarious.

I have something called the Genuine Basement Tapes, http://www.punkhart.com/dylan/reviews/basement_tapes.html Is that considered part of this set? I love Genuine Basement Tapes a whole lot, though the sound is hard to take at times.

For the period from 75 to 95, I liked Slow Traing Coming, Shot of Love, Infidels, and Biograph the most. I sort of lost track after Empire Burlesque, until Time Out of Mind.

Good choice! On another board, where someone asked for Blakey recommendations, after the long list of recs like Moanin', etc. , these are the two I recommended. I don't recall one volume being better than the other, though.

Yeah, I caught that reference. Strangely enough, it also reminded me of a song Hank Williams used to do as Luke the Drifter, Be Careful of Stones that You Throw, a sort of recitation (written by Bonnie Dodd). It's something Dylan did on the Genuine Basement Tapes, never officially released. The "gone gardener" is the voice of compassion. A neighbor was passing my garden one time She stopped and I knew right away That it was gossip, not flowers, she had on her mind And this is what I heard my neighbor say: "That girl down the street should be run from our midst She drinks and she talks quite a lot She knows not to speak to my child or to me." My neighbor then smiled and I thought: CHORUS A tongue can accuse and carry bad news The seeds of distrust, it will sow But unless you've made no mistakes in your life Be careful of stones that you throw. (SPOKEN) A car speeded by and the screamin' of brakes A sound that made my blood chill For my neighbor's one child had been pulled from the path And saved by a girl lying still. The child was unhurt and my neighbor cried out: "Oh! who was that brave girl so sweet?" I covered the crushed, broken body and said: "The bad girl who lived down the street." CHORUS (Every Grain of Sand might be his most highly regarded song since BOTT.)

Thank, medjuk! The OED entry only confused me about royalties. In any case, I received my copy yesterday and listened to it in light of Dylan's remarks about the sound quality of cds. I guess he thought it sounded better in the studio than the final product. I think Ain't Talking is the song to talk about.

Would someone please elaborate on royalties and why Dylan should pay Muddy Waters' estate etc. royalties for these adaptations? At most, wouldn't his publisher pay a fee to the publisher of Waters' work for permission to make a derivative work, and the publisher of Waters' work then pay a share of the permission fee to the estate? That is not a royalty at all. It doesn't at all seem to fit the definition of royalties I find in the Oxford English Dictionary: "A payment made to an author, editor, or composer for each copy of a book, piece of music, etc., sold by the publisher, or for the representation of a play." But the publisher of Waters' work has not sold a copy in this instance, and Dylan has not. The publisher might only charge for permission to adapt the copyrighted work. I worked in print publishing, and we never paid a share of a permission fee to any author. We paid them royalties, i.e. a percentage of the money made on each copy of their work sold.

Bunk and Miff

Hambone Willie Newbern, descended from Adam and Eve.

Below is the entry for Web in Encyclopedia Britannica. Note the distinctions between it and the Internet. The Internet is bigger, encompassing other information retrieval services such as email, ftp, and gopher. "The Web the leading information retrieval service of the Internet (q.v.; the worldwide computer network). The Web gives users access to a vast array of documents that are connected to each other by means of hypertext or hypermedia links—i.e., hyperlinks, electronic connections that link related pieces of information in order to allow a user easy access to them." So it is part but not all of the Internet. And there are other information retrieval services on the Internet, including email with DOS, ftp, and gopher, though these are mostly superceded by Web communications. Here is a quote from the entry on Internet: "a system architecture that has revolutionized communications and methods of commerce by allowing various computer networks around the world to interconnect. It supports human communication via electronic mail (e-mail), “chat rooms,” newsgroups, and audio and video transmission and allows people to work collaboratively at many different locations. It supports access to digital information by many applications, including the World Wide Web." I know most people use Internet and Web interchangeably, but they are different. I am told that kids today don't use either word much anymore. The just say they are online. Save it to historians, I guess, to remember the original distinctions. And it's like Stephen Colbert of Comedy Cental said of Wikipedia: if you get enough people to say something's true, then it becomes true. Enough people have blurred the distinction, so for all practical reasons they have made the two indistinguishable. That's all I meant.

Most important would be not the Internet but the Web. Without the Web, the Internet would be mostly e-mail, ftp, and gopher. It would probably just be used by ARPA folks.

I haven't voted yet, but I would say dominance by Microsoft and Google are annoying. And, more recently, the appearance of Wikipedia: Google Announces Plan to Destroy All Information it Cannot Index I just get annoyed with all of Google's projects like Google Books, Google Scholar, etc. and this one is meant to be serious: Know it All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise Wikipedia founder says that if it isn't found on Google, then it doesn't exist, and other outrageous claims.

Not sure where to put this among the various topics, but here is a nice movie of Alan Lomax's American Patchwork episode Lache pas la Patate that came out around 1990 and was filmed in the early 80s. A fair historical overview. Included: Dennis McGee Canray Fontenot Bois Sec Ardoin Walter Mouton Dewey Balfa and Robert Jardell Octa Clark and Hector Duhon Fred's lounge Mamou Hour Cajun Band with Revon Reed, Sady Courville, Preston Manuel and Jack Leger Michael Doucet Barry Ancelet Hackberry Ramblers (Luderin Darbone, Edwin Duhon, Crawford Vincent) Wade Fruge Dorestine Fontenot Odalis Montoucet and many more Lache pas la Patate (Don't Drop the Potato)

Where are you getting your numbers? I look at this source, Baseball Almanac, at http://www.baseball-almanac.com/hitting/hibavg3.shtml George Brett!

I think we are talking about different species. This, from Encyclopedia Britannica: "About 1,500 species of cicadas are known; most are tropical and occur in deserts, grasslands, and forests. In addition to the dog-day cicada (Tibicen and others) that appears yearly in midsummer, there are also periodic cicadas. Among the most fascinating and best-known are the 17-year cicada (often erroneously called the 17-year locust) and the 13-year cicada (Magicicada). These species occur in large numbers in chronologically and geographically isolated broods." Apparently in 2004 we had the Brood X 17 year cicadas, not 14 as I stated earlier. Washington Post story, Whistling Sweet Nothings, Cicadas Abuzz, June 1, 2004 "Act One was self-explanatory. Hibernating cicada nymphs emerged from the ground and crawled around. Act Two also was straightforward. They molted and left behind a diaphanous, buggy husk. They began to fly. Act Three, the Washington region has learned over the past week or so, is more mysterious and complex, something you almost have to experience to understand. Words seem inadequate to describe that vaguely menacing hum-whistle that seems to be everywhere but emanates from no single place in particular. Hollywood imagery helps. "It feels like an alien spaceship coming in," said Arlington resident Gene Miller, 66. "You ever watch that old 'Star Trek' episode where they leave their phasers on and try to melt something?" asked George Fox of Alexandria. "That's what it sounds like to me." We've entered the peak of the Brood X emergence -- a roughly three-week period when millions of male insects are doing what evolution designed them to do, which is mate before they die. That means the males are singing, often in unison. The collective mating call produces what many described in a sort of shorthand as, "you know, the UFO sound." Male cicadas gather in densely packed "choruses," projecting what entomologist David Marshall said is "among the loudest sounds in nature." The females are silent. "If those males don't mate, they've utterly failed," said Marshall, of the University of Connecticut. "So everything they're doing is centered around that sound." The noise probably will last until the third week of June, when most of the cicadas probably will be dead, said Gaye Williams, a Maryland Department of Agriculture entomologist. Predicting precisely when the emergence will end is difficult, she said, because it depends on many variables -- temperature, moisture, humidity. They sing until the bitter end, she said. "When they're dying, it's the last thing that goes," she said. "At the very end, it almost sounds like a heart monitor. It's very sad." The singing is mostly a daytime phenomenon. At night, cicadas for the most part go quiet because cooler temperatures and darkness calm them down. Conversely, direct sunlight and heat amplify the racket. "That's the main thing the males are doing out there," Marshall said. "They're doing some feeding, but other than that, they're calling to convince the females." The sound is produced by membranous panels beneath the cicada's wings. The panels, called tymbals, vibrate rapidly. The cicada's body, mostly hollow, serves as an amplifier. Even the bug's eardrum gets in on the noise making, vibrating along with the tympanum to produce an even louder noise. Each species has a signature song. The noise we hear in the Washington area is produced by three different species, all part of the emergence. Although it can be hard to tell when the cicada chorus is fully amped up, there are dozens of distinct sounds. Some cicadas prefer to whir. Some whistle. Others click. When a male cicada's song leads to success, specific sounds lead up to the procreative act, and then others are emitted during the denouement, Marshall said. "It's a very fast ticking," he said. Cicadas also emit a distress signal when they are threatened or trapped, a sound that is louder, less musical and more rattlelike than the mating call. This seems to unsettle listeners more. Staci Largen, 27, said she was awakened one recent morning in her fifth-floor Arlington apartment by what she initially thought was a person screaming. The noise came through her closed window. She later bought earplugs so she could sleep. "It sounds like somebody getting ax-murdered," Largen said. Others likened it to the thrushing squawk in Alfred Hitchcock's horror classic "The Birds." Gene Miller, a retired American Airlines freight handler, said it provides a "pleasant" soundtrack to his daily routine. He was scribbling in a book of logic problems -- his late-morning diversion of choice -- recently in Fort Ward Park in Alexandria. The UFOs were descending. "I think it's fantastic. I just like it, okay?" said Miller, sipping a Diet Coke at his favorite picnic table. "When they go away, I'm going to miss them." The chorus can reach about 90 decibels, experts said. That's roughly the equivalent of listening to a lawnmower from about 10 feet away. The noise isn't likely to cause hearing damage, said Brad A. Stach, president of the American Academy of Audiology in Reston. Eighty decibels is generally considered the threshold for hearing- damaging noise, Stach said. But it takes prolonged exposure to noise above 80 decibels to begin causing problems. "The likelihood that [cicadas] are going to cause you any permanent problems is small," Stach said. It is the haunting vibrato of the cicada choruses, less than the volume, that seems to inspire artistic interpretation. Tamara Smyth, a lecturer at Stanford University, designed the tymbalimba, an elaborate metal instrument which is played with the fingers, like a piano. It interacts with a computer to produce music. George Fox, an Alexandria Web designer and amateur composer, has written a song called "Brood X" (http://www.f2sys.net/brood-x/), which he produced with synthesizers. Melded into the throbbing electronic baseline are recordings of real cicada noise. "The rhythm track, what would be normally played on a cymbal or a high hat, are actually cicada," Fox said. Fox also wrote a song for the cicadas during their last emergence, 17 years ago. He tried to reproduce it by turning a bicycle upside down, spinning the wheel and clicking drumsticks across the wheel and spokes. "It was really experimental," Fox said. "I don't know if it was all that listenable." It's a tough noise to describe, much less duplicate. When words fail, even such experts as the University of Connecticut's Marshall resort to mimicry. "Wheeeeeeeeeeroo, wheeeeeeeeeroooo," the entomologist said. "Wheeeeeeeeeroo."