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One of my very favorite television shows is <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/sunday/main3445.shtml"><i>Sunday Morning</i></a> on CBS. I look forward to it all week long, and when I wake on Sunday mornings, it's the first thing that comes to mind. I usually wake with just enough time to brew a pot of coffee and get comfortable in front of the television.
Today in <I>Slate</I> (which, as some of you know, is where I do most of my writing, mainly on national-security politics), I lay out—as I have in each of the last five Decembers—my <A HREF= "http://www.slate.com/id/2180205/"> picks</A> for the 10 best jazz albums of the year. Here are the best of 2007:
Helen A. S. Popkin has written a fine <A HREF="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22251370/">opinion piece</A> on the new, phenomenally wrong-headed Congressional Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (PRO-IP Act), which among other things (such as absurd penalties) includes a spanking new enforcement agency called WHIPER (White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative).
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Andrew Ferguson has written a <A HREF="http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2007-11/Interview.html">highway history</A> of Abraham Lincoln. Among other observations, he points out that the man who "waged one of the most savage wars in our history" was definitely <I>not</I> non-judgmental.
<A HREF="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/boyinthemoon">Walker Brown</A> was born 11 years ago with "an impossibly rare and random genetic mutation—cardio-facio-cutaneous syndrome, a technical name for a mash of symptoms. He is globally delayed and can't speak, so I never know what's wrong. No one does."
Was Frank Sinatra's failed marriage to Ava Gardner responsible for one of the greatest <A HREF="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/sinatra">comebacks</A> in American art?
It is the audio writer's nightmare that the combination of the large number of exhibitors at a Consumer Electronics Show and the very limited amount of time the Show's doors are open will lead him to miss the event's biggest story. I came close to living that nightmare last January, at the 2007 CES, when I realized that I had missed an entire floor of Las Vegas's Venetian Hotel. And it was, of course, the floor where, among other high-profile high-end companies, Sumiko was debuting the Cremona Elipsa from Italian speaker manufacturer Sonus Faber.
<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/688vandersteen">Richard Vandersteen</A> was in good form at the 20th-anniversary seminar held by retailer Advanced Audio on November 11, 2006. When asked about his priorities in loudspeaker design, he sat erect in the seat next to me and thundered, "I will <I>not</I> [<I>slams table with open hand</I>] spend one red cent on cosmetics that I could have put into improving the sound of a loudspeaker!"