Wes Phillips

Regular readers will be aware that the semidetached brownstone next door caught fire this week and the Brooklyn FD battered down our door to make sure we were safe. One of the next door kitties is MIA, presumed dead.

New research seems to reveal that the loss of "white matter" because of aging is what causes us oldies to get all addle-pated. I'm not sure I buy the premise that young brains are automatically more "in sync."

Here's a handy site for travelers: TravelPost.com has a chart listing all the US airports with WiFi, complete with their rates and terminal locations. (Some airports do it right and offer free access to their hostages, er, guests.)

The list of poetry editors with whom I am not familiar is not a short one, but until I read this appreciation of Al Alvarez in The Scotsman, I only knew his name from my tattered copy of The New Poetry—a book that lived on the transmission hump of my 'lime green 69 Plymouth Valiant and got quite a workout as I waited (endlessly) for my waitress girlfriend to get off shift at the IHOP.

For Martin Luther King day, here's John Coltrane's haunting "Alabama," which, according to Sascha Feinstein and Craig Werner, was based on the rhythms of the eulogy Martin Luther King delivered at the funeral for the four girls slain when their church was dynamited in Birmingham.

A good read from The New Yorker. I saw a special on the Enigma Project once and they interviewed a woman who had worked with Turing at Bletchley Park. She basically said that everybody at BP was phenomenally bright, but that Turing was a genius and that the difference between being intelligent and being a genius was the difference between going from A to G and from A to Zed. Genius didn't need the intermediate steps that even the very brightest of us require.

Albert Fuller has died. I enjoyed his playing a lot and, the one time I met him—we shared the elevator to Weill Recital Hall—he was gracious enough to tell me about the night he met Igor Stravinsky.