Music player back online

...albeit w/ a different look than before. Oh well.

Music player offline

Sorry. Not much new here anyhow, so...

Free cookbook for a good cause

Go to Barilla's website and download The Celebrity Pasta Lover's Cookbook for free. For each download:

Barilla will donate $1 to America's Second Harvest - The Nation's Food Bank Network, with a total donation up to $100,000.

According to Kristin Davis, who was on Conan last night plugging it, Mario Batali "advised" on the recipes, so they're likely to be relatively simple and tasty.

Plus, it's a good cause, so do it!

* * *

Reminds me of a site I've visited for several years now where one click (supposedly) provides 0.6 bowls of food to animals in shelters.

Just cuz I know you really care

It's about that time for me to review what's in the old blog playlist these days (and don't say, "A lot," smart aleck).

• "Black Cow" -- Steely Dan, Aja (1977): Quintessential '70s jazz-rock w/ some great narrative, good solos (Victor Feldman on electric piano, Tom Scott on sax)...and it's the Dan, so it must be good, right?
• "Low Down" -- Boz Scaggs, Silk Degrees (1976): Funky piece by Boz to whom I was really introduced by a co-worker and now really can't go much longer than a day without taking a listen.
• "Fascinating Rhythm" -- Dave Grusin, The Gershwin Connection (1991): Grusin (probably known best, somewhat unfortunately, for the theme to St. Elsewhere) keys this Gershwin arrangement with one of my favorite drummers (Dave Weckl) and my favorite vibraphonist (Gary Burton).
• "Follow Me" -- Pat Metheny Group, Imaginary Day (1997): Just a chill instrumental with cool guitar effects and driving piano by Lyle Mays.
• "DJ Culture" -- Pet Shop Boys, Discography (1991): Why not?
• "Again and Again" -- The Bird and the Bee, The Bird and the Bee (2007): Catchy post-pop ditty (recently performed rather sketchily, IMHO, on The Tonight Show).
• "Keep Moving" -- Ivy, In the Clear (2005): Dark yet bouncy (a la Saint Etienne), rife with melancholic trumpet...genius.
• "Reelin' In the Years (Live)" -- Steely Dan, Alive in America (1995): Great re-imagining of the original Dan classic; features Cornelius Bumpus on sax and Georg Wadenius on guitar.
• "Undertow" -- Chroma Key, Dead Air for Radios (1999): Dream Theater member's side project; just because...
• "Come In Out of the Rain" -- Engineers, Engineers (2005): Hailed by many in the Brit press for being at the vanguard of that nation's new music movement.
• "Soul Circus" -- Victor Wooten, Soul Circus (2005): Flecktone bass deity goes to town and adds some (more) soul.
• "Check the Rhime" -- A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory (1991): Killer track from seminal collective's debut album.
• "Green Earrings" -- Steely Dan, The Royal Scam (1976): For a long time, my favorite Steely track; great bass and guitar work, especially in the bridge.
• "Opening" -- Philip Glass, Glassworks (1990): Sparse piano provides insights into the minimalist mind of Glass.
• "The Night Belongs to Mona" -- Donald Fagen, Morph the Cat (2006): Post-9.11 paranoia takes hold of a formerly bubbly Manhattanite, but Fagen makes it fun (sort of).
• "The Hook" -- Stephen Malkmus, Stephen Malkmus (2001): Fun narrative piece by the former Pavement front man.
• "Political Science" -- Randy Newman, The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1 (2003): Even though it was written in the '70s, this song (this version is only Newman and his piano).
• "Back In the Day" -- Christina Aguilera, Back to Basics (2006): Xtina's paean to those who came before.
• "Almost Gothic" -- Steely Dan, Two Against Nature (2000): My favorite song from Becker and Fagen's Grammy-winning comeback.
• "Nothing Personal" -- Stefon Harris & Blackout, Evolution (2004): Driving, vibraphone-driven combo jam.
• "3 Sides" -- W. Ellington Felton, Outrospective: Me Then, Me Now: DC-based conscious artist who DJs (at least, until recently he did) during Belgian Beer Happy Hour at Bohemian Caverns.
• "Pixeleen" -- Steely Dan, Everything Must Go (2003): The Dan turn gamers (or is it indie auteurs) and manipulate an impressionable and attractive youth.
• "Everywhen" -- Massive Attack, 100th Window (2003): These trip-hop pioneers go at it again in this really dark (but mesmerizing) piece.
• "The Hollow" -- A Perfect Circle, Mer de Noms (2000): I can't believe this Tool frontman "side project" album is seven years old.
• "Premonition" -- Manic (2006 [?]): Downloaded from Amie Street; a good counterpoint to "Everywhen."
• "Down In the Bottom" -- Walter Becker, 11 Tracks of Whack (1994): First track off of the long-silent other Dan-ite's debut solo album.
• "That Door" -- Grow (2006 [?]): See "Premonition"; sounds like the Max Weinberg 7 dropped a little of the swing and added some funk (and vocals).
• "Sal Mineo" -- Doxy, Doxy Demos (2006 [?]): See "That Door"; hard-driving track that I like, but I must admit that any band that uses the name of a relatively long-forgotten movie star/murder victim will win my vote any day.
• "Jet Lag" -- Joss Stone, Mind, Body & Soul (2004): Bluesy pop from the apparent reigning queen of that idiom.
• "Sleepless" -- Marconi Union, Distance (2006): Don't try any lifting and don't operate heavy machinery after listening to this coma-inducing sonicscape.
• "Coming Back to Life" -- Pink Floyd, The Division Bell (1994): All the things one likes about more recent Floyd (i.e., strong Gilmour guitar, intros that last for three minutes, no Roger Waters muckin' about).
• "Dr. Wu" -- Steely Dan, Katy Lied (1975): Phil Woods' sax solo is but one piece of this masterful musical puzzle.
• "We R in Need of a Musical Revolution" -- Esthero, Wikked Lil' Grrrls (2005): The title says it all.

If you'd like more information on any of these tracks, let me know; I just don't particularly feel like doing a bunch of links, etc., right now. Sorry.

You should check this out (if you haven't already)

I don't remember which MySpace blog it was that told me about this link, but if you click on it, you can view An Inconvenient Truth for free; it's in two parts, which are navigable by use of the pull-down menu at the top of the page.

I'll admit to being more than a little skeptical about a documentary starring Al Gore and which was about a topic that has been questioned on more than one occasion. After watching it, however, its message rings true to me and I strongly recommend that you view it -- either via the link I provided or by actually contributing to the economy (i.e., going to the theater or renting the DVD via Netflix or whatever other purveyor you so choose).

Libations for the politically-inclined

If you're going to watch SOTU tonight (that's "State of the Union" for the uninitiated [i.e., anyone outside the Beltway and/or who doesn't care a whit about politics]), you may want to take a gander at Wonkette's idea of a good time during said event (thanks to Democracy in America for pointing it out to me).

Time to go home, watch some NHL All-Star festivities, and go to bed.

The 100th post: Should I or shouldn't I...

...try oysters?

"Why is he asking this?" you may be wondering. Well, last Sunday (1.15.07), I stopped in to the local Legal Seafoods and contemplated trying an oyster or two from their raw bar. I did not at that time, but since then:

• I saw an episode of Good Eats (starring my favorite Food Network personality, Alton Brown) in which oysters were the featured ingredient;
• I read "The Five-Minute Guide to Oysters" in the February issue of Esquire; and
• One of the first books I saw on display during a visit to the Crystal City Olsson's was Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.

I'm not a big believer in fate, destiny, etc., but I think something's trying to tell me something...

The ghosts of QBs past

In the February issue of Esquire, Chuck Klosterman has penned an interesting and, at the end, really humorous (at least, to me) piece on pro athletes turned TV analysts and their accomplishments/abilities during both phases of their lives. For a taste, here's the concluding paragraph, which just so happens to be about one of the worst quarterbacks my beloved and always beleaguered Vikings ever have fielded (I added the link for the person in question's name):

Sean Salisbury: If you discount the print-media buffoons (Jay Mariotti, Skip Bayless, et al.) who go on TV with the express intent of destroying whatever credibility the newspaper industry once had, Salisbury is the least cogent, most wrongheaded voice in the sports media. He's an atrocity. Yet this broadcast lunacy has saved his gridiron legacy. Salisbury's career-passer rating was a dismal 55.1 and he never had one decent season, but in retrospect that production looks amazing. It seems impossible, but it's true: Sean Salisbury was better as a player. Which is just about the craziest sentence I've ever written.

Ancient Chinese secret, huh?

Shockingly, this is not a post about Calgon ("...take me away!") -- it's about a very unique cold retardant/remedy discussed in Time's "The China Blog."

Almost sounds good ("almost" being the operative term).

Reading more and reading "better" books redux

Here are some letters to the editor re: the CSM piece on reading "the classics," about which I posted a couple of days back:

Modern relevance of classic literature

Janine Wood's Jan. 16 Opinion piece, "Please, I want some more Dickens," really struck a chord with me. Last fall, my husband and I attended our first open house at my daughter's high school. The English teacher reflected on the choice of novel for the semester. "We either do 'Twelve Angry Men' or 'Great Expectations,' " she said. "But we're considering dropping Dickens because he's just too hard for the students."

One mother agreed with the teacher. But I begged her to keep Dickens – and my daughter indeed read "Great Expectations." We had great discussions about this story, even though my husband and I struggled to remember the intricacies of the plot.

But I do remember the first time I read a classic, thinking that I would find it so boring. The book was "Jane Eyre," and to this day I am haunted by Jane, Mr. Rochester, and the mad woman in the attic. That novel encouraged me to read other classics and to understand the allusions that can be found throughout literature.

Hooray for Ms. Wood's suggestion that we encourage reading of the classics. I think the best way to start is in the home, so I'll be pushing one of my best-loved books ("Little Women") my daughter's way again.
Maeve Reilly
Champaign, Ill.

Regarding Janine Wood's Jan. 16 Opinion piece on reading classic literature: Works by Charles Dickens are often found in the children's section. Why? Because adults do not want to read them. Keep in mind that Dickens was a serial writer. His material was meant to be read in sections over extended periods of time. What is more, his works were not written to satisfy any great literary calling; Dickens was a hack paid by the word.

Can children, or even most teens, appreciate the political satire of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels"? Will Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" have the same influence now as it did in its day, since slavery has long ended? How many could grasp the nautical dialect that peppers Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick"? It is time to accept the fact that so-called classics are irrelevant to most modern readers. Defenders of the classics need to accept this and discover that there are many fine modern books as well.
David Cohen
Alturas, Calif.

My word of the day

Panglossian

Pronunciation: pan-'glä-sE-&n, pa[ng]-, -'glo-
Function: adjective
Etymology: Pangloss, optimistic tutor in Voltaire's Candide (1759)
: marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds : excessively optimistic

From Wikipedia:

The term "panglossianism" describes baseless optimism of the sort exemplified by Pangloss's beliefs, which are the opposite of his fellow traveller Martin's pessimism and emphasis on free will. The phrase "panglossian pessimism" has been used to describe the pessimistic position that, since this is the best of all possible worlds, it is impossible for anything to get any better.

The panglossian paradigm is a term coined by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin to refer to the notion that everything has specifically adapted to suit specific purposes. Instead, they argue, accidents and exaptation (the use of old features for new purposes) play an important role in the process of evolution.

As used in a paragraph:

Solar still has one big economic problem: It costs roughly twice as much per kilowatt-hour as power from the grid. But an unusual confluence of events is changing that calculus and making even jaded investors wonder if there isn't something more to solar than hype. First, of course, are rising petroleum prices. True, they're off their highs, but you'd have to be a Panglossian optimist to look at the Middle East and believe oil and natural gas will really become cheap again. ("Let the Sun Shine," Fast Company, February 2007)

Hockey fights in a different light

Thanks to Off Wing Opinion for passing this recent set-to between Georges Laraque of the 'Yotes and Raitis Ivanins of the Kings along. Trust me -- you've never seen a fight quite like this.

New music

I took a little while today and made some revisions to the playlist at right. Hope you enjoy.

Reading more and reading "better" books

After a week's lapse in blogging, I've returned with an opinion piece appearing in yesterday's (1.16.07) Christian Science Monitor. In it, a homemaker and writer from Deerfield, Illinois, bemoans the fact that school/teen reading lists are lacking in the "classics." I'll be the first to admit that, as a youth (not that long ago, mind you), I read a lot, but in general, didn't read the "great books" -- unless you count the illustration-filled mini-editions (always 238 pages, if I remember correctly) of The Three Musketeers, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Oregon Trail, etc., that I whipped through in a couple hours' time; I wish I could remember the name of that series. Anyhow, I agree with Ms. Wood's point-of-view and, as such, have taken the liberty of adding a few links to her commentary; hope she doesn't mind.

***

Please, I want some more Dickens

A fruitless search for the author at schools and on teen reading lists inspires a parent's literary crusade.

By Janine Wood

DEERFIELD, ILL.

Do you know any seventh graders reading "Great Expectations"? If not, maybe you should. In his book, "The Educated Child," former Education Secretary William Bennett suggests the Charles Dickens novel be part of a seventh- and eighth-grade reading list. I referred to Mr. Bennett's list recently while helping my 12-year-old son choose a book.

"Great Expectations!?" Now that's expecting a lot, I thought. I remembered picking it up on my own in eighth grade. But would adolescents today read Dickens in their leisure time? Maybe Mr. Bennett's book, written seven years ago, had made an impression. I called a local librarian. No, she said, "Great Expectations" is not a hit.

Next I polled my neighbors' children. Seventh graders on my block weren't reading "Great Expectations." They weren't reading "A Tale of Two Cities," "David Copperfield," or the "Pickwick Papers" [sic] either.

"Classics are stupid," said one 13-year-old girl, whose desperate mother had tried paying her to read Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women." "I'd have to buy my son 17 North Face jackets before he'd look at a classic," said another mother.

Why did Bennett's recommendation seem so far-fetched? Yes, television, iPods, and computer games interfere with reading, but was that the only explanation? Maybe the Dickens novel was simply too hard to find. I wanted an answer.

First, I visited the children's section of the library. The books displayed most prominently in the center of the room addressed contemporary social issues such as anorexia, homelessness, divorce, and poverty. I finally found some by Dickens tucked away toward the back of the room.

I left the library and wandered over to the local bookstore. While I relaxed with a book by the 19^th-century essayist Thomas De Quincey, a middle-aged woman entered and asked a saleswoman for a book recommendation.

"Do you want chick lit, a page-turner, or a romance?" the saleswoman asked. Oh, how I wish she had asked, "Do you want Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, or the latest translation of 'The Iliad'?" I felt as though I were at Wal-Mart instead of the bookstore, and that prompted me to wonder what other adults were reading. I asked around at the bookstore's cafe. Nobody had read Dickens since college and even then it was a chore. "I hated all that detail," one woman complained.

Then I scoped out the bookstore's teen section. Risqué images graced the covers of books with titles such as "Skinny Dipping" (second in the "Au Pairs" series) and "Gossip Girl." For boys, there were paperbacks that looked more like computer games than books – glossy covers depicting space ships and intergalactic battles.

"It's all teen trash," said the mom who had tried bribing her daughter to read "Little Women." "I might as well buy her a 'Harlequin Romance.' " How could the little black and white sketches of chubby men smoking pipes that appear in the older editions of Dickens compete with sexy girls romping on beaches?

"The answer is obvious," said a local father of two high school girls. "Teachers don't read Dickens, so they don't assign him." And sure enough, I looked at my son's past summer reading list and Dickens wasn't there. Neither were Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, or Stephen Crane. It seemed clear: For students in junior high, Dickens doesn't exist – not in book groups, not in schools, not at the library, and not at home. "Bah, humbug," I growled, and went off on a search for Mark Twain.

Parents, start a revolution! Unplug all electronic gadgets and get your children reading great books again. Here are a few tips:

• If "Great Expectations" seems too difficult, read the first few chapters aloud. Ask your child to read the rest.

• Ask your child to read at least 75 pages before giving up.
• Listen to classics on tape.
• Ask librarians to make the classics more visible to children.
• Start a children's book group. Gather a few children together. Meet at a local bookstore. The discussion doesn't need to be long – 10 minutes will do.
• Get in touch with the Great Books Foundation, which offers a list of age-appropriate books and instructions for guiding discussions.

Together, we can save Dickens – and others like him – from extinction!

The apotheosis of NBA oddity

Thanks to D.C. Sports Bog for passing along a Hump Day diversion, which, once and for all, settles the discussion as to the otherworldly ancestry of a certain L.A. Clippers (and former T'Wolves) point guard.

Caveat lector

Blog posts may become more sporadic now that Congress is back in session, so bear with me.

And no, I didn't know how to say "let the reader beware" in Latin without using an online translator.