24 hours of world air traffic

Cool stuff.

The password is....

...statistics.


H/t-Greg Mankiw.

Weather Report-"Birdland"

Some hot music for the weekend. This is Weather Report, in 1978, playing Joe Zawinul's Birdland. The band includes Joe, the incomparable Wayne Shorter on saxes, Peter Erskine on drums, and the amazing Jaco Pastorius on, unusually, fretted electric bass.

The shuffle rhythm sounds a little strange, compared with the recorded version.

The early fusion bands-like WR, Dreams, and others played fresh, original music. Later the form deteriorated into useless junk, and led to people like the execrable Kenny G.


H/t-Rifftides.

Truthers, birthers, and the media

I go to Ann Coulter's site, my browser crashes.

Hmmm. That never happens when I go to The Huffington Post. I smell a conspiracy!


We right-wingers love to buy into conspiracies, you see. We all love the notion that President Obama wasn't really born in the US.

This despite the fact, as Coulter points out, that every major conservative news source,

"... including Fox News, The American Spectator, Human Events, National Review and Sweetness & Light -- i[s] discrediting the idea that President Obama wasn't born in this country and, therefore, is ineligible to be president.

"Now the big question: Was Joe Biden born on this planet?"

As Ann notes, consider which party contains the people who believe or believed the following:

"-- O.J. is innocent;

"-- Bush shirked his National Guard duty;

"-- Sarah Palin's infant child, Trig, was actually the child of her daughter;

"-- Justice Antonin Scalia threw the 2000 election to Bush so that his son could get a legal job with the Labor Department;

"-- The spectacularly guilty Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed;

"-- The Diebold Corp. secretly stole thousands of Kerry votes in 2004;

"-- Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper;

"-- Bill Clinton did not have sex with 'that woman';

"-- Heterosexuals are just as likely to contract AIDS as gays;

"-- John Edwards didn't have an affair with Rielle Hunter;

"-- John Edwards' campaign aide Andrew Young is the father of Rielle Hunter's child.

"And as has been recently noted, a 2007 Rasmussen poll showed that 35 percent of Democrats believe Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, while 26 percent aren't sure ..."

And get this-Janeane Garafalo, fashioning a new way to keep her name in the news as her career fades, believes Ken Lay faked his own death. No word on whether she still expects JFK to return from that long Mediterranean rest trip.

To the guillotine with you!

Our old buddy Erik Keilholtz at Erik's Rants and Recipes hasn't posted since Bastille Day.

I wonder if the peasants reached his inner sanctum and offed with his head.

His bitter opposition to their cause may've been his comeuppance. You just can't reason with the unwashed masses.

Freddie Hubbard: "Moanin'", "You Don't Know What Love Is"

One of the hottest trumpet soloists ever, Freddie Hubbard, wailin' on "Moanin'", with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, from 1962. Nobody had more talent than Freddie (who died a few months ago), and, for the most part, he put it to good use.


UPDATE: I've added Freddie from what looks to be mid-'70's on the wonderful ballad, "You Don't Know What Love Is". Freddie's on fluegelhorn here, on which he had one of the best sounds in jazz. Dig the opening cadenza! Unplayable stuff there. The whole performance is Lee Morgan-type swagger, with more chops. Not saying Freddie is "better" than Lee.

You can see how Freddie blew out his chops in the early '90's. He beat the crap out of them, night after night.

Okay, now I know what I'm doing wrong

"There are only two roads that lead to something like human happiness. They are marked by the words: love and achievement."

Theodor Reik, A Psychologist Looks at Love

Cash for Crocs

I'm not big on fashion.

I look like an unmade bed, myself. "You've either got or you haven't got style", as some guy named Sinatra once sang.

I haven't got.

But I do know ugly when I see it, and Crocs, an oddly popular shoe "style", are just dog-ugly.


And so noted shoe fashionista Manolo, whose only rival in shoe fashion coverage is long-time blogdom favorite Dustbury, suggests the ultimate economic/aesthetic stimulation plan: Turn in a pair of those fugly Crocs, and get a nice crisp $10 bill towards the price of a pair of shoes that don't offend the rest of the human race.

Turn in two pairs, get $30?

Can't top that

The original Rene'[s] Apple.

I can't match that. No way.

Maria Farres Bosch, Mahler 5th, 1st Movement

Okay, in my last post I dumped on Monette trumpets. Here's Maria Farres Bosch, the principal trumpet of the Barcelona Symphony, playing Mahler's 5th, 1st Movement, on a Monette and sounding great.

You can tell Monettes because they (usually) have extra bracing, I'd guess you'd call it, that makes them look like toy trumpets (plus they aren't shiny-they have a dull lacquering or lack of same on them). In Maria's hands, this is no toy.

Maynard Ferguson-"Night in Tunisia"

I get more traffic from music clips than anything else, so I guess I should post more of them. Here's Rene's Apple fave Maynard Ferguson playing a blistering arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie's "Night in Tunisia." This is from 1991, when MF was 63, and still had that amazing sound and chops.

Some of that may be equipment-a lot of people, including myself, aren't crazy about that Monette trumpet sound. MF went to Monette later, and while he got a good sound from them, he probably should've stuck with his Holton MF Horns, as Monette trumpets tend towards a hybrid, neither here nor there trumpet/flugelhorn sound, which is a problem for Wynton Marsalis (as much as I like Wynton) and others. Anyway, great chart, great band, great leader.

Enjoy!


UPDATE: What's fascinating about this is how much, at an advanced age for trumpet pyrotechnics, Maynard plays on this chart. There's a improvised intro, the melody in middle and upper registers, a jazz solo, an interesting muted trumpet solo, the melody again, and some final screaming. That's enough to put a younger guy in the hospital.

"Suppose the birthers are right?"

The controversy over where Barack Obama was born is, no doubt, a silly one. Yes, he grew up all over the planet-Indonesia, Hawaii, Kansas, Antarctica, etc., and his loyalty to the US is certainly in doubt (just kidding-I think), but his birth in the Aloha State is unquestionable. Still, conspiracy theories, if you can call this one, have a life of their own-having arisen from factors other than reason, they're unresolvable by facts, logic, or common sense. Here the "Votemaster" at electoral-vote.com breaks down what would happen if it were shown that the President was actually born outside the US:

"A small, but very noisy, group of protesters is claiming that Barack Obama is not a 'natural-born citizen' and thus ineligible to be President. Obama has shown his birth certificate and two Hawaii newspapers published birth announcements (based on data forwarded to them by the state, not by Obama's parents). State officials have also repeatedly said the original certificate is on file and says Obama was born in Honolulu.

"But suppose magically it were proven that Obama was actually born in Kenya. What then? If he refused to resign and the House refused to impeach him, probably nothing. Any private citizen suing him would have to prove he had standing to sue, which would be very difficult unless the plaintiff could prove Obama had injured him. Cases in which someone doesn't like a decision a politician made are routinely thrown out for lack of standing to sue, even when the underlying facts are correct. For example, a case against Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who voted to raise the salaries of Supreme Court justices when he was a senator (one of those little constitutional no-no's) was thrown out for this reason even though Black's ascension to the Court was unambiguously unconstitutional.

"In recent years, the issue of a member of Congress being appointed to a position whose salary he or she voted to increase has come up repeatedly (e.g., Baron Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State). The usual solution is for the salary to be reduced to the old value until the office becomes vacant again."

Legislators and regulators losing confidence in out-of-touch public

Amazingly enough, unregistered "self-lobbyists" seek to influence the activity of the Federal government. These people, unschooled in the arcane policy matters they ludicrously choose to opine on, only interfere with the rapid and smooth functioning of their betters, I mean leaders, in Washington. Sen. Arlen Specter and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius report on these grim events:

"...[R]ecent evidence suggests that America's hard-working hometown legislators are feeling the pinch from a fickle and increasingly out-of-touch voter class who no longer serves our needs.

"Nowhere has this disturbing trend been more evident than in the recent debate over health care reform. Like hundreds of our fellow legislators and government officials, we recently traveled to a town hall meeting to distribute a grassroots press release explaining why this critical legislation is a done deal. Our advance staffs said that should anticipate a respectful, positive hearing from local media and bused-in union members. Instead we were greeted by a rude howling mob of idiot 'voters' who refused to listen to reason, and ruined what should have been a killer photo op for our re-election ad campaign.."

Man, even furniture choices are political nowadays

Megan McArdle hates IKEA:

"A visit to an Ikea warehouse brings home what progressives like, and libertarians hate, about Scandinavia: it's the Kingdom of Lagom, where everyone has exactly the same, perfectly adequate, stuff...

"It is not much of an exaggeration to say that my current life's ambition is never again to spend four hours messing around with an allen wrench and seventeen feet of badly veneered particleboard. I hate the way Ikea furniture looks, its tendency to fall apart, and most of all, the homogenization of our national homes...."

The only thing I ever bought from IKEA was a futon which I found impossible to put together. I'm not exactly handy with tools, so it may've been my fault, but I'm glad (even if I shouldn't be) to know I'm not the only person who's had that experience.

As for the political angle, I see the matter as more of a religious one, a vision in which Purgatory is filled with people who will get out just as soon as they can follow the ersatz-English instructions (or whatever their native language is) and finish putting together that IKEA chair they were working on when they croaked.

Timothy Geithner can't figure out how to sell his house

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Home Crisis Investigation
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

Our beloved Treasury Secretary/tax cheat, Timothy Geithner, is having problems selling his New York State home. Guess why?

He's asking too much for it. He bought it in 2004 for $1.6 million, and now wants more-$1.635 million. Really. Bright guy, that Tim. He's the man I want telling the President how to fix the housing market, and the economy.

A really ugly bathroom isn't helping, either.


H/t-Greg Mankiw.

Aging graysfully

"Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth,

that are written down old with all the characters of age?

Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly?

Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?

And will you yet call yourself young?"

Will Shakespeare, Henry IV, part 2



In fewer than four weeks, I will hit the big 5-0.

Fifty.


Gafferdom.


Fossildom.


Geezerland.


Decrepitude.

I am not prepared for this. If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would've taken better care of myself, as the old line has it.

Yet here I sit, aging at the uncomfortable rate of one day for every twenty four hours, and I'm none too happy about it.

I want my youth back. Not that I want to be that person again. God no. I just don't want my very finite supply of available years to become all the more finite. My bold plan to live to 100 (I did have a grandmother who made to 102, mostly to spite the rest of us) looks silly, even to my often silly mind.

You see, to live like "dear Old Granny", I'll have to hold onto every penny that ever comes in the door, drink little (easy enough), not smoke (still easier), and play a ton of bridge to keep my mind supple (will chess do?). I'll also have to have the rare gift of making nearly everyone hate me. I'm good at this, but I don't want to foster the tendency, thank you.

Oh well, I'll just make the best of what time I have left. I could go any day now. Not that I'm sick or anything. I'm almost never sick. It's just that we gaffers have to deal with reality-we're one bad flu epidemic away from the grave.

By the way, I keep waiting for that "aging population" trend to work to my advantage-somehow it never does.


UPDATE: Maybe this bit of drollery from ol' Will is more appropriate:

"Thou hast not youth, nor age,

But as it were an after-dinner's sleep dreaming on both."

Measure for Measure.

Barack Obama, mad racial theorist

The Gates contretemps was a teachable moment, but not in the way the President saw it. It taught us, or maybe after Rev. Wright merely reminded us, that Obama's instinctive fear and loathing of white people is still very much alive.

Shelby Steele with an apt and funny analogy:

"Where race is concerned, I sometimes think of the president as [one of] the Peter Sellers character[s] in 'Dr. Strangelove.' Sellers plays a closet Nazi whose left arm—quite involuntarily—keeps springing up into the Heil Hitler salute. We see him in his wheelchair, his right arm—the good and decent arm—struggling to keep the Nazi arm down so that no one will know the truth of his inner life. These wrestling matches between the good and bad arms were hysterically funny.

"When I saw Mr. Obama—with every escape route available to him—wade right into the Gates affair at the end of his health-care news conference, I knew that his demon arm had momentarily won out over his good arm. It broke completely free—into full salute—in the 'acted stupidly' comment that he made in reference to the Cambridge police’s handling of the matter. Here was the implication that whites were such clumsy and incorrigible racists that even the most highly achieved blacks lived in constant peril of racial humiliation. This was a cultural narrative, a politics, and in the end it was a bigotry. It let white Americans see a president who doubted them."

UPDATE: "On race, no he can't!"-Andrew Breitbart on how Obama tried to stifle a real debate on race at the ludicrous beer summit.


FURTHER UPDATE: "Top ten things heard at the beer summit", including:

9. “Why the non-alcoholic beer, Joe? If you get a little drunk, do you get reserved and coherent?”

8. “Quiet! Don’t say that with the cops around!”

7. “I have to confess, I’m a little prejudiced against blacks myself. Every time Malia and Sasha hug me, I check my wallet.”

"Organic" food is no better than non-organic

I never really knew what organic meant in this context, anyway. Is it inorganic to use pesticides? What if that insures bug-free food? What about fertilizer? "Natural" isn't by definition wonderful-arsenic is natural, too, but I don't want to consume the stuff.

"Organic" just seemed like a label people who wanted to feel superior to the rest of us attached to their pricy eating habits.

It turns out that they needn't have been so high-hat about the whole thing:

"A systematic review of literature over 50 years finds no evidence for superior nutritional content of organic produce.

"There is no evidence that organically produced foods are nutritionally superior to conventionally produced foodstuffs, according to a study published today in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition..."

Nonetheless, consumers pay big bucks for what is now a big market, some 29 billion British pounds.

No global warming here in Philadelphia

It's been a cool summer. Temperatures in The City of Brotherly Love were 1.7 degrees below normal in July, after being 1.2 below normal in June. The July high temp. was 92 on the 29th, the low 61 on the 10th.

What does it prove? Absolutely nothing. But if conditions in the Northeast had been above normal lately, the New York Times and such would be busily telling us that this is yet more evidence of man-made global warming. Don't be surprised if they try to spin even the cool weather as proof that evil mankind is wrecking the world in one way or another.

Do juicers belong in the Football Hall of Fame?

Amazingly, here's a story about football players and steroids.

Some small portion of the media may actually be noticing that this isn't just a baseball problem.

I guess they've caught on to all the 300 pounders in high school football.


H/t-Ann Althouse.

Money gone for Cash for Clunker Congresscritters program

It's a shame, because this would've been money well spent:

"The so-called ‘Cash for Incumbents’ program provided up to $4,500,000 for each politician who voters replaced with a modern public servant that burns less IRS revenue, and emits fewer vitriolic toxins into the atmosphere. The measure contained a provision requiring voters to ‘junk’ the old politician, to ensure he doesn’t return to Capitol Hill as a lobbyist."

This may be an argument for the global warming crowd-I've heard they couldn't find enough ice floes to put all the oldheads on. And Bobby Byrd resisted with all his might. When he gets up a head of steam in that wheelchair, look out!

Time to settle...

...for that only semi-appealing potential partner-the Fermi paradox says there are likely no more than ten extraterrestrial civilizations out there. Your choices are necessarily limited.

Did you have the SETI thing running on your computer? Remember, it was supposed to find radio transmissions emanating from somewhere in the galaxy. I did, and I never found a thing, although I did pick up a stray I Love Lucy episode from 1956. Lucy got to be in the show, but blew her lines.

Quick thought-if all aliens ever see is I Love Lucy, will they figure we only have three colors-black, white, and gray?

Tracking Biden's gaffes, a new site emerges

Sorry, I slipped into Philadelphia Inquirer Pompous Speak for a second there.

Joe Biden Said That? will try to track all of Joltin' Joe's slips of the tongue and/or ego. They'll be busy.


Here's a personal fave:



Biden celebrates FDR's great talk on TV after the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Of course, Hoover was Pres in '29, and FDR's Fireside Chats were on radio, but what the hell? Why disturb Joe's fragile grip on reality?

The best part is where Joe says a leader "demonstrates that he or she knows what they're [sic] talking about."


UPDATE: I guess I shouldn't be too nasty as regards the Inquirer. A friend works for philly.com, the paper's website.

Al Hirt, Dizzy Gillepie, Don Ellis, Pete Candoli-together

Three of my favorite trumpeters-Dizzy Gillespie, Don Ellis, and the brilliant (if underrated) Al Hirt, plus Pete Candoli, also a fine player, on a TV special from the late 60's or early 70's. Al's commentary is engagingly goofy.

Fun stuff.


UPDATE: More Don Ellis-this is New Horizons. Don't try to figure out the time signature!

Chet Baker-"Blue in Green"

Chet Baker, "Blue in Green", very late in the game for Chet. His playing was stronger near the end than many recognize. Ignore the annoying piano solo. The bass solo's pretty bad too. Oh well.

The tune is from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, of course. Chet/Miles comparisons are often made, usually unflatteringly to Chet, due to their somewhat similar styles. Chet actually was the better bebop player, when he was younger and had more chops. Of course Miles was the great innovator, but innovation in art is often over-rated. Is Picasso really better than Goya?

No, this doesn't match Miles' version, but it's still pretty good.